So, how good are you at seeing things?

The video is for a campaign to pay attention to cyclists on the road, but it’s derived from an experiment made by the University of Illinois’ Visual Cognition Lab and it’s something to keep in mind not only when we are driving or playing basketball, but also when engaged in interaction design: people won’t see what they aren’t looking for. Even if there’s a big colourful sign it’ll tend to be missed if there aren’t other clues about what the visitor to a website should be looking for, of if they are not expecting it.

Here is another one, let’s see how long it takes you to notice what changes in this picture.

Saw it? If you haven’t the answer’s at the bottom. Anyway, that image was also part in another experiment that tried to determine how good are humans are recognizing visual change, and it seems we are not very good at all. Unless something is considered important, it’ll go unnoticed. The flash between both images acts as a kind of “brain reset” for what we are seeing. It’s something to keep in mind in interaction design, whether we want the user to notice a change or make them look the other way so they won’t see us putting the rabbit in the hat before pulling it out again.

This lack of awareness for some stuff could be a survival mechanism that made us pay more attention to things that are close to us that could kill us and less to things far away. Because even if things far away could kill us, who cares? they’re far away. And if it’s a volcano or a flood it’s not like you can run away from it very successfully.

We can take advantage of this limitation of the human mind to manipulate gently encourage users to perform the actions that are more important for the objectives of our site and to create a less confusing and more useful interface.

What do you think? Should we use these techniques or should we just be blunt?

Oh, yes! The answer to what changes in the image above.