Attention

What is Attention?

Attention refers to people's ability to focus on things in order to gain information. Without focus, it's not possible to absorb information even if it's available.

Attention is the most important resource of the information age. When anyone can access any information at any time from anywhere, they're only limited by their ability to pay attention to things. And by their free time, which we can ignore, because time is an universal limiter.

It's only possible to pay attention to one thing at a time. If two things demand your attention, you'll be distracted, unable to focus and dedicate yourself entirely to one thing.

This applies to user interfaces and to using the web in general.

In User Interfaces

A user interface can demand a user's attention in various ways. The amount of demand, the force that pulls the user's eyes away from what they're focusing, varies from method to method.

A static notifier is the weakest form of demand. The user may notice it from the corner of their vision, but they won't feel pressured to care about it. System tray icons are a good example of this.

Static notifiers also have degrees. A notifier with a bright red colored badge pulls the user more than one without such color, specially if the interface is generally monochrome. Using accent colors to pull the user is a common practice on the Internet.

The next degree are animated notifiers. Animated notifiers are generally a terrible idea. When parts of the screen change without a user's input, they're forced to look at the changing parts. All manners of animations can become distracting if used incorrectly.

In the past, all manner of websites used animated image banners and 88x31px buttons to attract users' attention. These were typically a link to their website. In other words, they wanted to be obnoxious so people would look at them, giving them a better chance of being clicked on to gain visitors.

The main good use of animations are for important time-dependent notifications, e.g. a task has finished. This notification requires urgent attention, because if the user looks at this information at a later time, it won't be clear which task was completely. On the other hand, if the user doesn't require such information, then this notification should never appear in any form whatsoever.

The next degree are elements that suddenly appear on the screen, such as chat messages that appear as they are sent.

Finally, we have elements that appear or disappear with animations. These take the most attention when we except modal dialogs that require user input. They're often thought to be pretty, but in general they're just needlessly distracting.

Take, for example, a panel that slides from the top of the screen when a user drags a window (as seen on Windows 11). The focus of the user is currently on dragging the window. If a panel starts sliding, they'll look at it as if it was some sort of notification, their focus distracted from the window they're currently manipulating. This will occur EVERY SINGLE TIME the user tries to perform this task. How much human time was wasted globally because an interface designer thought this animation was a good idea?

If the panel appeared instantly, without an animation, it would be less distracting.

Dark Patterns

User interface designers can construct interfaces to manipulate users' attention. There is nothing intrinsically good or evil about this fact. If we can manipulate people into achieving their goals without realizing that they're being manipulated, that would be awesome. Many game designers make use of attention manipulation to guide players into achieving tasks when the players themselves aren't certain about how to play the game.

Why do you collect things? Because they shine, glow, or bounce. They catch your attention.

On the other hand, you can also manipulate people's attention for evil. Anti-user practices, also called dark patterns.

For example, on Twitch, and many similar websites, you'll see an icon that looks like a notifier telling you that you have received a message on social media, gained a follower or something like that. It has a red dot on it, telling you something changed. But that icon appears in that form even if you don't have an account and are visiting the website for the first time. It's there just to make you click, interact with it. Inside, you'll just find announcements. These are news about Twitch that Twitch wants people to read about but that they can't place on their homepage, because the main content of their homepage isn't their announcements.

On the Web

Paying attention is costly. We pay attention to things because we assume we'll gain something from the attention spent. In other words, we aren't exactly "paying" attention, we're "investing" attention and we expect to profit from it.

As with any investment, there are opportunity costs. If X gives you a 10% profit, and Y gives you a 100% profit, you could say that investing in X cost you 90% of the profits you could make if you had invested in Y instead.

Similarly, each second of attention we invest in one thing is a second of attention we failed to invest in something else.

There is an "economy of attention" going on.

Too many people are wasting too much attention, fruitlessly, on social media. Getting "informed" by memes about issues that really don't concern them, nor do they have any power to do anything about. Harboring strong feelings about events that they only know about from a screenshot of a tweet in a subreddit dedicated exclusively to Youtube drama.

This isn't a profitable way to invest your attention.

You'll benefit a lot more about your family, your neighbors, people close to you, than learning about some guy from the Internet. The Internet is a beautiful device that removes physical barriers. We can talk to anybody anywhere on the planet. Distance doesn't matter to the Internet, but that doesn't mean that distant issues are worth our attention.

Somewhere in the world, terrible things are happening. But bad things are also happening in your town. They may not be on the same scale as global things, but you have much greater power to fix problems that are physically closer to you. The only question is whether you're willing to pay attention to them.