Capturing the user's attention: insights from the study of human vision

An effective user interface is a cooperative interaction between humans and their technology. For that interaction to work, it needs to recognize the limitations and exploit the strengths of both parties. In this talk, I will concentrate on the human side of the equation. What do we know about human visual perceptual abilities that might have an impact on the design of user interfaces? The world presents us with more information than we can process. Just try to read this abstract and the next piece of prose at the same time. We cope with this problem by using attentional mechanisms to select a subset of the input for further processing. An inter-face might be designed to .capture. attention, in order to induce a human to interact with it. Once the human is using an interface, that interface should .guide. the user.s atten-tion in an intelligent manner. In recent decades, many of the rules of attentional capture and guidance have been worked out in the laboratory. I will illustrate some of the basic principles. For example: Do some colors grab attention better than others? Are faces special? When and why do people fail to .see. things that are right in front of their eyes.