The interfaces we're building need to work in distracting environments. And we need to figure out how to cope with users' tendency to get distracted. This presentation looks at how we might achieve that. And why, I think, it's the most serious problem facing interaction designers today.

1. Driven to distraction
@gilescolborne
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bartvandijk/4362990052/
1

2. On 10 October 2011,
BlackBerry’s messenger
services went offline for 3
days.
During that period, Dubai
police reported a 20% drop
in road traffic accidents.
Abu Dabi police reported a
40% drop.
This opens a window onto
a hidden problem:
The interfaces we create
are killing our users.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stepnout/2550739848/ 2

3. Distraction is a problem
for our users. So it should
be a problem for us.
Part of the problem is the
shift from desktops to
mobile.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/
3

4. The number of smartphones and
Worldwide sales (millions)
tablets sold now exceeds desktop
and notebook sales. Expect
mobile traffic to exceed desktop
800
traffic within three years.
You are here
The design problem isn’t just
screen size and input methods.
600
It’s also distracting contexts
(even when we’re using
smartphones at home).
But there’s another kind of
400
distraction...
200
0
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011E 2012E 2013E
Desktops & Notebooks Smartphones & Tablets
Source: Morgan Stanley 4

5. Even when we’re
4168
concentrating fully on our
devices, the constant ping
of email, Twitter and
Facebook stops us from
concentrating.
Office workers typically
check email 30-40 times an
hour.
We proudly call this
‘multitasking’. And each
generation seems more
prone to multitasking.
5

6. People in their 20s are
twice as likely to have
large numbers of items
open on their desktops as
people over 50.
50+
Does this mean there’s a
generation of elite
multitaskers coming
through? Should we
40-49 reflect this in the
personas we write?
30-39
20-29
0% 25% 50% 75% 100%
5 or fewer items 6 or more items
6

7. Well... no. Stanford
Psychology Professor
Clifford Nass studied the
performance of high
mutlitaskers and low
multitaskers.
He discovered that
people who regularly
multitask tend to be
worse at it than people
who don’t.
And people who
mutlitask seem to
experience side effects
long after they stop.
They’re less able to
concentrate, less able to
learn, less able to
discriminate relevant and
irrelevant information.
Multitasking, it seems, is
Clifford Nass bad for your brain.
7

8. Sure, you can walk and
chew gum at the same
time. But for complex
decision making, there’s no
such thing as multitasking.
Your prefrontal cortex can
handle one task at a time.
If you interrupt that, it has
to file away an (imperfect)
memory of your task and
pick it up again later – an
inefficient process.
8

9. Interfaces like email are
addictive. When you see a
new message in your inbox,
your brain gets a little hit of
dopamine.
Frequent, random rewards
like this are the most
powerful way to train
people. And that’s what we
get in email, Twitter... and
the interfaces interaction
designers admire the most.
9

10. It’s what makes Tetris so
addictive. Random items
needing a simple response
(nothing complex that
would make you want to
put the game down).
And repeat. For hours.
10

11. This game has been doing
my head in. Random
characters arrive asking to
be taken to random floors
giving random rewards.
Insanely addictive.
And as for Twitter...
Tiny Tower Do not download
11

12. OMFG
No wonder people are addicted to these
interfaces. Little nuggets of information
randomly updating. Users don’t stand a chance.
Yet it’s damaging their minds, causing accidents
and stops them from living in the moment.
We design this stuff.
What should our response be?
12

13. We just could tell users to deal
with it. Leave the problem to self-
help movements like ‘Getting
Things Done’ (GTD).
Which is like saying Alcoholics
Anonymous should fix society’s
drink and drugs culture.
Or saying we can fix usability
problems by getting users to read
the manual.
As an industry, we’re better than
that.
13

14. It strikes me that the problems users
face are similar to those of people
suffering from Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder.
I’ve spoken to educators and experts
in ADHD about the Cognitive
Behavioural Therapy strategies they
deploy. Maybe we can take some
design lessons from them.
14

15. 1. Minimise distraction
If you’re coping with ADHD, some
key advice is to create spaces where
you can operate without distraction.
Can we help people to do this?
15

16. Educators encourage people with
ADHD to use timers to break tasks
into 15 minute sprints and focus for
that period. Kind of like the
pomodoro method for time
management.
16

17. Software like Vitimin R puts this on
your computer’s taskbar.
But this is an add-on solution. It’s
GTD for your computer.
As designers, we need to think about
what we can do to improve the user’s
work environment.
17

18. We could stop our software from
interrupting people unnecessarily.
Skype plays a noise every time that
one of my contacts on the other side
of the world shuts down Skype. Does
it need to do this?
I think not.
18

19. Does iCal need to jump to the front of
my windows to tell me that someone
responded to a meeting request?
No, it does not.
We need to design more thoughtful
alert systems.
19

20. 2. Focus
20

21. This is a reading overlay used by
some people with dyslexia. The ruler
helps them focus on one line of text.
The coloured overlay seems to
improve their focus, too.
I often see something like this in
user tests when participants
highlight chunks of on-screen text
that they’re trying to read.
You can imagine how you might
design an online form so that the
text under the user’s focus is
highlighted.
21

22. 3. Increase motivation
For too many people, ‘motivating
users’ means giving them prizes or
points for completing tasks. But
there’s lots of research to show
those ‘extrinsic rewards’ aren’t great
motivators. Is there a deeper
solution?
22

23. Educational psychologist Carol
Dweck has written about how
changing people’s mindset increases
motivation.
People who focus on their ‘ability’
become demotivated - because each
task has a chance of failure and
possible proof that they lack ability.
People who focus on learning,
irrespective of success, see tasks as
an opportunity for ‘growth’.
Maybe taking the win/lose out of
our interfaces will motivate users
and stop their attention from
wandering.
Carol Dweck
23

24. Years ago I designed this car
configurator. It replaced a ‘wizard’
style interface where the user had to
complete a number of steps in
sequence to see their finished car.
Instead I gave users a default
configuration and a tabbed
interface. They could tweak things in
any order they liked. The
configuration was always ‘complete’.
When it launched, we found users
were twice as likely to complete all
the configuration tasks.
It’s an example of exploration and
‘growth’ beating ‘pass/fail’.
24

25. Clifford Nass ran an experiment
where he gave participants blue
wrist bands and asked them to
complete tasks a computer.
For half the participants he put a
blue border on the computer screen
and said ‘you and the computer are
the blue team’. For the other half, he
gave the computer a green border
and said ‘you’re the blue guy working
on the green computer’.
When the colours matched, people
tried harder and thought the
computer was smarter.
Motivating users can be as simple as
making them feel the computer is on
the same side as them.
25

26. 4. Decrease pressure
When we’re under pressure, we tend
to give in to our addictions – like our
addiction to petty distractions.
How can we reduce pressure?
26

27. Game designers spend a lot of time
tuning the learning curve of their
games to make it engaging without
being stressful.
They aim for a smooth learning
curve.
When was the last time you analysed
the learning curve for your app or
website?
27

28. Add this option
You can remove it later
When faced with high-risk choices,
users are likely to give in to
distraction.
One way to reduce pressure is to let
people know there’s an ‘undo’
option.
28

29. 5. Facilitate recovery
If all else fails – and it will – what can
you do to help your users recover
from distraction?
29

30. Again, video games provide a clue. If
you pause some racing games during
a high-speed manoeuvre, when you
un-pause you’re not dumped back
into the game (because you’d always
spin out of control). Instead, you’re
shown a couple of seconds’ replay
before you regain control of the car.
It helps you re-orient yourself.
Something similar happens when I
pause my iPod during a podcast: it
rewinds slightly when I un-pause.
You can see how you might use this
in an app. When the user returns, the
area of focus could be highlighted
and the rest of the app could slowly
build in. I imagine it would take
some fine-tuning, but it’s worth
exploring.
30

31. A simple plan?
• Minimise distractions
• Focus
So people with ADHD can suggest
some interesting strategies and
• Increase motivation design patterns that we can use to
tackle the problem of distraction.
But you can see more work is
needed.
• Decrease pressure And if we’re going to plan for
distraction we need bigger tools
than design patterns.
• Facilitate recovery
31

32. And: understand context
We need to be able to model users’
context in more detail so we can
predict where distraction may occur
and target our design efforts.
32

33. I’m not talking about adding a line to a persona.
‘Dave likes to check websites on his iPhone,’
Big deal.
I mean proper analytic tools.
But current tools to model context seem
cumbersome and hard to implement. Can you
imagine using OWL-DL (a context modelling
language) in a stakeholder workshop?
33

34. Our tools for task analysis are well
developed. I want something as
powerful and engaging as Indy
Young’s ‘mental modelling’ with
post-its to help me pinpoint
problems of user distraction.
34

35. The task analysis tool GOMS-KLM helps
us predict how interfaces will perform.
And it recognises that cognitive load is
important. Maybe we should be using
this kind of analysis more.
K Press a key on the keyboard 0.20 seconds
P Point the mouse to an object 1.10 seconds
B Button press (mouse) 0.10 seconds
H Hand from keyboard to mouse 0.40 seconds
M Mental preparation 1.20 seconds
W User waiting for the system to respond
I’m struck by the fact that we lack
tools and methods that will enable
us take a strategic approach to
managing and tackling distraction.
35

36. We’re designing products that are
killing our customers. We have
widespread evidence for this. Yet
we’re not addressing the problem.
In fact, we spend our time thinking
about how to make our interfaces
more addictive.
I’m reminded of the tobacco industry
in the 1960’s and 1970s trying to
avoid mounting evidence that its
products were dangerous.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/visioplanet/4760316376/
36

37. During that same period, the
computer industry was facing the
problem of usability. And it
developed the design patterns and
analysis tools that we’ve used ever
since.
The pioneers of that age are
remembered as giants in usability.
Today, we find we have a new
challenge. Distraction.
Xerox Alto
37

38. I think we’re at the start of a new era You?
in human computer interaction – one
in which the design patterns and
analysis tools we need have yet to be
developed.
These are problems that need solving.
And if someone’s going to solve them,
and enter the hall of fame,
why shouldn’t it be you?
38

39. Thank you.
@gilescolborne
39