What Eyes Want - Christopher Butler

As readily as I advise my clients that fewer and fewer lookers will ever become readers, I also encourage them that there is much to be gained from just a look. And I am seeing greater interest on their part in thinking deeply about achieving clarity and simplicity, of packing as much information in as little signal, of being ever more intentional

If there is a single thing that I, as a designer, find hopeful about the current state of digital design it is the dismantling of the brute harnessing of distraction. While digital advertising isn’t going anywhere, the way we attach ads to content is becoming more visually elegant, and less aggressively distracting.

The Grail scene is a useful illustration of how we navigate the world. And it’s a useful guide for anyone making anything that they hope will receive sustained attention. Just because your thing is the “true grail” of its kind doesn’t mean that your audience will “choose wisely.” Most won’t, and won’t even be capable of doing so.

The connection between the eye and the mind is, especially for designers, obscured by common phrases we often use in describing the choices we’ve made, our intent for them, and our analysis of how they work: This arrangement of text and image “draws the eye”; this alignment maintains “line of sight”; this heat-map “tracks the eye” and shows where “

As surprising as that may seem, it does reflect a true understanding of human physiology. Eyes, after all, don’t do any thinking. They are as smart as the lens of your camera. In fact, they are basically the same; when open, they take in light. Light creates electrical impulses that travel the optic nerve to the visual cortex in the occipital lobes

And because it has been so effective — stoking desire, after all, is a million times more easily done than satisfying it — virtually every design practice in the digital landscape has taken cues from it. The result is a crowded landscape through which we voluntarily speed, faster and faster, and one in which almost every piece of information is ens

The goal of any page, of course, is to retain attention through its two major phases. First, transient attention, which is to say, “the short-term response to a stimulus that distracts attention” and then, second, selective sustained attention, which is conscious focus. A fascinating presumption in differentiating between these two forms of attenti

Research on this has been done, as well. In a study titled, “Where the Eyes Wander: The Relationship Between Mind Wandering and Fixation Allocation to Visually Salient and Semantically Informative Static Scene Content,” a group of scientists attempted to observe how the mind orders and prioritizes visible information and how conscious we are of tha

Set aside all the academic jargon — these studies are very difficult to read! — and the point is rather stark: our vision and perception are far sharper than is our own awareness of them. We see and understand even when we think we are not. This has major implications for design.

Still, it sounds impossible, doesn’t it? But it is at the root of virt