{UX} User Psychology: Navigating Your User’s Attention While Designing Experiences

Attention is the act of carefully thinking about or noticing someone or something. It refers to a person’s momentary, or recurring, interest. Typically we, as designers, may think of our user’s attention as a fleeting thing that we only have so much time to attract, then hold, then fight to keep.

This understanding of how Attention works can result in eye-catching design elements and ‘cool’ features. It’s basically like adding a bunch of shiny, moving parts to our work in hopes of catching a fleeting gaze and alluring the audience. These design decisions are slightly misguided, though beneficial when implemented in moderation.

To observe your own Attention, check out this short video:

The video illustrates the selective nature of our Attention. Our brains can only fully focus on one thing at a time. In this case, our brains are focused on keeping track of the ball and counting every pass. While doing this, we are very likely to miss the Black Belt Guerilla. As designers, we really need to become familiar with two types of Attention: Surface Attention and Content Attention.

Surface Attention refers to a user’s interest being more focused on superficial aspects of your product. For example, it has become sort of trendy to use parallax scrolling in our websites. This is when the background and the foreground move at different rates while scrolling. When utilizing a feature like this, we should be sure that our user won’t be more focused on playing with our site than the information on the page.

Content Attention means that our user is actually seeing and retaining that information. The content on the page is the whole point of the website afterall. We don’t want our content to be overshadowed by the shiny things, cool features, and gawdy design elements we’ve decided to use to catch attention. It’s a sad day when you realize all your effort to attract the Attention of your user has worked againts your goal of transmitting a message. Don’t let your content be the Black Belt Guerilla!

As passe’ as throwing a definition on the screen is, here we have such a screenshot. I’ve highlighted the specific content I want to be sure you see: Awareness. As designers it may be best for us to equate our user’s Attention to Awareness. Our job is to make our user Aware of the content we want them to know. Joel Marsh wrote an article on Attention, in which he informs us that our Attention works a lot like a spotlight, focusing on a single thing at a time. Rather than designing to catch the gaze of our user, we ought to think about making design decisions to direct the user’s spotlight on the content we want them to absorb or interact with.

We can use things like color, contrast, surprise (pattern breaking), big text and hierarchy, sounds, and motion (including the aforementioned parallax scrolling). None of this is new or fresh element of design; the true takeaway here is to be mindful of using too much, or too many, of these things as to not create a product that’s only capturing Surface Attention.

If a UX designer wants to design everything a user can experience, they miss the point of attention.

UX isn’t about creating a perfect world. It’s about eliminating everything that competes with our goals and user goals.

Good UX is reductive, not expansive.

— Joel Marsh