verstehen

We’ve all seen it at some point. We design an interface that includes a message of some kind. Maybe an error message, or something generally informative, and then we do some usability testing and people just don’t see it. So you make it bigger. You give it a background colour, then a brighter background colour. Still, a lot of people just don’t see it… Why?

Well in some cases it might be because people don’t expect to see it. Or to put it another way, while the message may have high sensory conspicuity (it’s big, bright and right in their field of vision), it may have low cognitive conspicuity (your eyes see it, but your brain doesn’t recognise that it’s something it needs to respond to).

There was an interesting analysis on this area conducted by Sussex University in 2002 about accidents involving police cars. Specifically it looked at why people crash into police cars when they’re stationery, in situations where they should be pretty obvious and impossible to miss. For example situations where a police car was parked on the hard shoulder of a motorway or dual carriageway, or blocking the scene of an accident.

Essentially it suggests that while police cars, with their flashing lights and bright colours, have very high sensory conspicuity, they are often used in situations where people either don’t expect to find hazards, or else are parked in-line with the moving traffic, in which case other road users fail to see that they’re stationary. So in various ways they might exhibit low attentional conspicuity.

So what does this mean from a user experience perspective? Well, specifically in terms of interaction design it means that making something bigger and brighter doesn’t necessarily always help. It depends on the context and content of the page. If I want to present an alert to users of a site that something needs to be done, then I need to ensure the rest of the page doesn’t suggest something else.

Take this page from Thomas Cook. I’ve run a search and they’ve actually failed to find any perfect matches, so they’ve cross-sold me something different. There’s a message there, but from usability testing I’ve conducted in similar situations myself I’ve found this kind of messaging is very frequently missed.

Although the message itself could be clearer, the real problem is that from a customer perspective, you’ve run a search and been given some results. You expected to see results, and you have them, so your attention is immediately given to reviewing the results themselves.

There are many different ways you can handle this, but I just wanted to highlight this as a way of thinking about design problems and to help avoid those “just make it bigger” discussions.