Lessons in UX: Design for diffused attention

Are you paying attention right now? Complete attention to the words that you are reading on this screen? Or are there two or three windows open on the computing device you are using? Is there also music playing in the background or someone chatting with you? I ask these questions to make my point…. If you are a user experience designer whose job is to create screens that users interact with, you need to remember your user base is often that is distracted, detached and multitasking.

And it’s not just the environment that’s a distraction. Users are preoccupied and distracted all the time, not just by what’s around them, but by what is in their heads. They are worried about their kids, or wondering what to cook for dinner. You can’t assume that the UI you have designed is their sole focus. Ever.

(Sidebar: I think that one of the reasons people love their smart phones is because these devices allow people to focus their attention. The smaller screen prevents more than one major element or task to be presented, and the way mobile software is designed forces “modality” – you can only do one thing at a time. But even then, there are distractions in the environment you should be cognizant of.)

So, how do you design for a world where users are distracted and preoccupied? Well, understanding the fact that users ARE distracted and are often not going to be 100% “at attention” is a good place to start. It brings to your mind the context of the situation, and accommodating context and situational understanding is a key to refining a design to support those factors.

What you are designing is also will inform how you support distracted users. If you are designing a turn-by-turn navigation system, then you want to make sure the area that contains the directions is significant and “loud” in the UI. If you are designing a mobile app that displays a spending graph, strip out anything that could distract from the primary data point that graph is intended to convey. Keep things simple, and serve up information simply and as well as you can.

Practically speaking, and as good as you may be as a designer, distraction will still be there for many many users of the solutions you create. The best you can hope for is that you provide a clean UI that doesn’t make things worse.

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