Published on <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/3-ways-people-arent-paying-attention-to-your-app-3fff112eaf1c?source=rss----eb297ea1161a---4">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Alan Sien Wei Hshieh 
The psychology of attention and how it affects your designs.
<img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*6UjfpEZt1pQ1CpGK-A3lgA.png">
Surprise! Attention spans <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjD_-WOxbHZAhUKQ6wKHdZGDFMQFggrMAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fhealth-38896790&amp;usg=AOvVaw281ex_xD0PHs3D8JZLLhr6">aren’t getting shorter</a>, but they’ve never been that great in the first place. Keeping users’ attention has a tremendous impact on continued user engagement, and more importantly, helping users achieve their goals. In fact, most users psychologically won’t read this far. Thankfully, understanding the cognitive science around attention can help us wrangle the ever-wandering attention span.
Here are some psychological tidbits to know about users, and how to design around them.
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<h4>Sustained attention lasts around 8 minutes</h4>
No matter how great a TED talk might be, it’ll usually hold on to someone’s attention for up to around <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945279800684">7–10 minutes</a>. The great wane usually starts at the 8 minute point. With TED’s eighteen minute limit, chances are, people tune out for half of the talk. Maybe there’s a reason the top ten YouTube videos are consistently <a href="https://www.minimatters.com/youtube-best-video-length/">under 10 minutes long</a>.
Thankfully, by getting users to take a break (or by moving to a new topic), we can reset the 8 minute limit. If you’re a content creator, try to keep the critical portions of video within the sustained attention timeframe. If your app is episodic (for example, it might be a game with multiple levels), keep each episode within the limit, so the level change will be a topic change. If you’re building an informational website or app, make sure that critical information is presented up-front, so users will actually get to it.
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<h4>No one can multitask</h4>
Sure, women might <a href="https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2050-7283-1-18">generally be better at multitasking than men</a>, but frankly, everyone is terrible at it. Multitasking <a href="https://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/182861382/the-myth-of-multitasking">wastes more time than it saves</a>, and constant context switches make users forget what they are doing in the first place. According to Cliff Nass, Stanford’s late professor (and this writer’s beloved thesis advisor!), multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy” and “everything distracts them”. <a href="https://news.stanford.edu/2009/08/24/multitask-research-study-082409/">The brain really just can’t do it</a>, and multitaskers tend to make a lot of mistakes.
So what does this mean? Encourage users to multitask as little as possible within your app. Remove distractions and extraneous notifications within your app. Then, make sure that if a user does multitask, mistakes are easily corrected. (<a href="https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/">But you’re already doing that, right?</a>)
In some instances, if mistakes can have dangerous effects, it might even be important to actively constrict the user. For example, iOS’ Do Not Disturb While Driving <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208090">detects when users are driving and hides distracting notifications</a> from users. Similarly, car entertainment systems lock users out when users are over a certain speed.
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<h4>People tune things out quickly</h4>
Do you have an analogue clock in your room. If so, listen intently for the ticks. Suddenly the clock feels almost overwhelming loud.
Users get used to consistent stimuli really quickly. For example, if a user keeps seeing banner ads on a website over and over, in the same place, that user will eventually stop noticing the banner altogether. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness">See banner-blindness.</a>) Think of this as a UI Boy Who Cried Wolf.
<a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0126974">Judgements of frequency also affects attention</a>. Users who expect to see a bunch of deer in a field will likely miss the chinchilla hopping around in the background. Security guards who are used to seeing people enter and exit a store frequently without a hitch will sub-conciously start to assume that everything is always fine.
What gets people to stop tuning out? Advertising agencies have known the secret for a long time: faces, stories, sex, and VISUAL INTENSITY. Because of this, website ads have added audio, crazy animations, flashing, and huge, click-bait text to get users’ attention.
As terrible as ads are, if you’re trying to get users’ attention, make sure you are constantly changing things up, so users don’t tune things out. If you belong on the Light Side, make sure you cater your UI elements and controls to only grab the appropriate amount of control from a user. Grabbing too much attention can be frustrating. Grabbing attention too often can make users lose sight of what is actually important.
Attention is one of those things that we can’t really impact as designers and developers. However, by understanding how users’ attention works, we can create better experiences that actually help them complete their goals. Since sustained attention lasts around 8 minutes, users can’t multitask, and users habituate to stimuli quickly, focus on creating user experiences that are as bite-sized, simple, and distraction-free as possible. It might be difficult, but thankfully, creativity “doesn’t just love constraints; it thrives under them.”
hshieh.com | @chunggukpanda
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<a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/3-ways-people-arent-paying-attention-to-your-app-3fff112eaf1c">3 ways people aren’t paying attention to your app</a> was originally published in <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io">Prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

3 ways people aren’t paying attention to your app

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