On Involuntary Attention and Web UIs

At•ten•tion n. The cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things.

There’s an enlightening read over at PsyBlog – Memory Improved by 20% by Nature Walk – about how walks in nature enhance our ability to remember things as opposed to walks in an urban environments.  The reason?

1. Our brains are involuntarily attentive (we can’t help but pay attention to things that threaten our survival like, in the author’s example, a bus coming towards us).
2. Our brains use directed attention to cope/reason/understand that which distracts us involuntarily (we realize the bus isn’t going to hit us if we move out of the way, but in doing so we need to watch out for that car in the passing lane).

In nature we have less of these attention-demanding stimuli and can let our brains process unthreatened.  In the study PsyBlog mentions, improvements were seen even when subjects looked at pictures of nature vs. urban environments in the time between their memory tasks.

What can web folk do with this information?

We can respect that our users are at the mercy of involuntary attention.  And while there are no virtual buses to avoid online, the beeps, bells and flashes we provide in our UIs are all involuntary attention grabbers.  These things chip away at our users’ ability to stay focused and retain information. We should save use of signals like these (even attractive colors like yellow) for situations where the benefits outweigh the cognitive cost we’re charging.