This great TED talk introduces the idea that we don’t see what we think we do. Watch the first five minutes, and do what the magician says, and I’m sure, like me, you’ll find yourself fooled.
The idea that someone can be fooled is not new, of course. Magicians and all form of artists (especially the con variety) have been doing it for centuries. But the more I read, the more I realize that we’ve got a pretty weak grip on reality anyway.
The Study of Attention
If you’ve ever read into a little coginitive science, you would have come across the following experiment: A person is told to watch a video where a number of people are passing basketballs between one another. The experimentee is told to count the number of passes. Midway in the video though, a man in a gorilla suit walks slowly across the middle of the scene. Amazingly, when asked about this later, most people say they didn’t see anything strange in the video. They literally didn’t see the gorilla because their focus was so directed!
This, and other wonderful experiments on attention can be found at the Visual Cognition Lab in the University of Illinois, including, this amazing “Construction worker” experiment:
You can see the original footage on the , construction worker Visual Cognition Lab page but I’ve made a storyboard with Comic Life with some screen grabs to explain what happens. This video is copyright Viscog Productions.
This is an astounding study. The brain is very keen to fill in the gaps, or warp our sensory input to match what we believe to be true. If you want to test yourself, try the ‘Gradual changes to scenes’ examples. Personally I didn’t see many of the changes, and if I did, I only had a rough sense of what changed, and was often wrong.
The Dance Music Display
Before getting into the software world, I was working at a large CD store. There were two levels, with Dance Music on the upstairs level. A massive neon sign pointed along the wall and up besides the escalator to the Dance Music section. But many people would still come to the counter on the lower level and ask if the store stocked Dance Music. “Can’t they read??!” we’d wonder. Then one day, the Dance Music guy from upstairs put a display of a few select titles on a shelf on the lower level. In between the select Dance Music CDs on the display were empty CD cases with the text “More Dance Music Upstairs”.
It was then I realized: People were literally looking for Dance Music, not the indications to it. They were in “find the right CD” mode, not “read signs” mode.
Unread Skitch Tips
In our Skitch application, keeping the interface clean meant many of the advanced features required you to hold down the Shift/Command/Option key. As a helpful reminder, we floated a little tip bezel above the main Skitch window.
Seeing What You’re Looking For
But you guessed it; nobody reads that. Why? Probably for the same reason. They’re looking for something they expect to be in a certain form (probably an icon). As a result, they literally cannot the text.
I’ve seen some great eye-tracking data from the respected Nielsen Norman Group for this. ‘Heat Maps’, an accumulation of eye-tracking data, show that many people literally don’t see the graphical ads on web sites. Even when the ads provided the answer to the experimentee’s task, eg “Find the lowest price Skiing holiday on the website”.
How to Make a UI Dissapear
Good UI design is about making the UI mirror the users mental model of the user. But the transmission from the UI to the user is not so clear, linear or instant. And sometimes you don’t want the user to incur the cost of noticing ever-changing states.
For example; we’re constantly inundated with email, IM, twitter notifications and the like. But the ‘Gradual changes to scenes’ example shows us that changes over a period of 15 seconds can go un-noticed, so it’s possible to change the state of something without triggering our attention.
Instead of popping up a notification, or adding a badge instantly, the UI could slowly fade in a change over 15 seconds. This could be applied across many areas of User Interfaces. And I’d personally love a computer experience which emphasized ‘flow’ and gradual, constant change. No longer would every little change pull your attention away from an important task. Instead, those Mail notifications, system messages and the like could gently change without you noticing, until you decided you wanted to actually look.
SIDENOTE: I actually turn off Mail.app notifications, and simply un-Hide Mail when I want to check for mail. I’m sure Merlin Mann would approve.
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