The NextStage CRO shares two rules for effective web design and provides an exercise for optimizing your site.
Every magician worth his salt learns from the beginning that people look where you direct their gaze. Doing this online is something I offer to clients and seminar participants.
I recently revisited the topic of where people direct their gaze for a client, digging up some research conducted years ago and published in a number of journals (for the curious, I'll list some subscription only links at the end of this column). Some brilliant (and free) examples of people missing what's right in front of them are available online at the Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale. We've covered different aspects of how people scan for information in previous columns: The Hungry Peasant, Follow the Eye, Landmarks Ahead? and Experience as an Equation. In this and the next column we're going to investigate people scanning for information and not finding it even though it's right in front of them.
What is "attention?"
We're going to start with a definition of "attention" as it applies to media. The one I'll use is a paraphrase of one from the "Journal of Consciousness Studies" articles cited at the end of this column: "Attention is the process of selecting some part of the environment for more careful inspection and involves excluding of the rest of the environment from inspection."
I use "environment" instead of "media" in the above because few people in your target audience are actually viewing your website or scanning your promotional material with their heads locked into an EEG, PSET, MRC or similar analytic device to measure their brain waves-- their eyes fixed on what the researcher wants to show them.
Most people interacting with your material have more distractions in front of them than can be counted. Someone is navigating your website or looking through your promotional materials. What gets that person's attention? Is it even something on your website or in your materials? Is it something you want to have get their attention? And remember, there's a big difference between getting attention, keeping attention and making things stick once you have their attention.
What people see
Reading through those articles long ago along with other research led me to create three rules for design and usability. In this column, I'll share examples of the first two, and then in the next column I'll give the rule that flows from the example.
Example #1: There is a famous vision experiment that goes like this: people are shown a video of two teams playing volleyball and are then instructed to keep track of how many times each team passes the ball. Simple enough, correct? When people are through watching the video they are asked, "What was unusual about this volleyball game?" The answers are usually about how much one team passed the ball, how often some team spiked the ball, things like that.
The investigators then ask, "Did anybody see the gorilla on the court?" and nobody did, even though when the video is replayed there's someone in a gorilla suit moving through the players on the court (For more on this, The Science Channel's "Extreme Senses: Vision" did an episode on this phenomenon.)
Rule #1: People ignore what they don't know they should see.
Example #2: Writer/Director/Actor/Producer Terry Gilliam ("Monty Python's Flying Circus," "Brazil," "Time Bandits," "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," "The Brothers Grimm" and more) tells a story about the final release of his film "Jabberwocky." There is a scene where a knight falls from a horse. Directly behind the night and captured on film is a prop truck -- evidently the lunch wagon -- for the shoot.
Lots of people were concerned that this would ruin the film, but not Gilliam because he knew no one would ever see it. Everybody's attention would be focused on the knight, not on what was irrelevant to the knight. Sometimes directors place visual oddities in their movies just to find out if people are paying attention. How many people ever noticed the stork legs walking across the screen when Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker come into town to find a spaceship in the first "Star Wars" movie? How many folks ever noticed the fellow turning the crank on the escalator in "Ella Enchanted" during the mall scene?
Rule #2: People see what they want to see.
Exercise: designing for what people see
Here is an exercise for implementing these two rules in your design methodologies. This exercise is best done as I've enumerated it so that your ideas build off each other rather than stepping over each other.
- Take a blank piece of notebook paper.
- On the left hand side make a column of numbers; 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. You can usually stop at "3" and I strongly suggest you force yourself to stop if you're going to number more than "5."
- Next to each number and in a middle column write down a single, important message you want people to know about your offerings. The moment you write a sentence that includes a conjunction ("and," "but"…) stop! Whatever comes after the conjunction goes beside the next number in your column. Just write down single important messages as they come to you. The concern is that you get three to five, not that you get the most important, second most important and so on.
- Now comes the right column. For each single, important message, write down the best method for expressing that message-- a photo, an illustration, a link, text, a menu item, an animation or something else. For example, if an important, single message for your website is that you offer overnight delivery, then perhaps the best way of expressing that message is an animated graphic of a delivery truck with flapping angel wings. Links should also include whether the link is a text line, an image (such as an Adobe Acrobat PDF image, a RealPlayer image, et cetera), a JavaScript animation, or whatever. You're working to come up with single, defining visual statements for each single, important message you want to communicate to your audience.
Some people find this exercise very easy, others find it almost traumatic. My suggestion for both ends of the spectrum is to go easy and go slow. Does this come easy to you? Good. Now go back and review your entries for single message-ness and single, defining statement-ness. Does this exercise make you want to find another line of work? Good. You've discovered your hyperfocus.
Relax, take deep breaths, and allow yourself the freedom to come up with one and only one important message-statement pair per hour or per day.
Now comes your homework:
- Take a piece of white paper and lay it down in front of you. Readers doing this exercise for a webpage should place the paper in landscape orientation (wider than it is tall), readers working in other media should lay the paper down according to that media's most often used format. Close your eyes. Without looking at your list, only by remembering the items in that right column -- the single, visually defining elements for each of your single, important messages-- draw them on the paper as if you were placing them on your media. Remember, your eyes are closed while you do this. Don't worry about overlapping items, and if something goes over the edge of the paper or isn't even on the paper-- so be it! Make a note of what's off, by how much and where.
Once you're done, let your drawing be. No changes are allowed, although you can do the exercise first to last over again and again and again if you wish. Just make sure you keep all the copies...
...until the next column, where I'll explain this exercise and that most media contains more than what you see.
Links for the curious
You can read more about people missing information that's right in front of them at:
(These are subscription links and contain material which may be unfamiliar to readers not conversant in the fields of consciousness studies and modality engineering.)
Joseph Carrabis has been everything from butcher to truck driver to Senior Knowledge Architect to Chief Research Scientist. His 22 books and 225 articles have ranged among cultural anthropology, mathematics, information mechanics, language acquisition, neurolinguistics, psychodynamics and psychosocial modeling--- and other eclectic topics. His knowledge and data designs have been used by Caltech, Citibank, DOD, IBM, NASA, Owens-Corning and Smith-Barney among others. Carrabis is CRO and Founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global, and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He is also inventor and developer of Evolution Technology. You can download sections of Carrabis' next book, "Reading Virtual Minds," at www.hungrypeasant.com.
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