My point, of course, was made: the visual language was wrong. But the insight is right in line with these studies: when our minds wander, they don’t stop thinking, and those thoughts form into judgements regardless of how conscious we are of that happening. For designers, understanding this is critical. We work against that reality with every image

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

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.

When Indiana Jones, for example, rapidly scans a room full of cups to find the true Grail, his eyes hardly rest on a single one for more than a tiny fraction of a second. And yet, his brain is calculating, cup, cup, cup, grail? no, no, no faster than he even perceives. It’s all transient attention until his eyes rest upon that humble “cup of a carp

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 “

Often our mind-body detachment is even more profound. It’s not uncommon for commuters to be so lost in thought that they hardly experience the drive itself. The same applies to most of our mundane movements through the world. Even now, as I type this, I focus more on expressing thoughts and hardly at all on the individual movements of my fingers on

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 eyes are no more important a sense-making tool of the body than the ears, nose, tongue, or skin. Our apprehension of reality is so much more than just seen. And yet, the seen has a much greater share of human culture than the heard, smelled, tasted or felt. That may seem hyperbolic to say, but it has actually been studied! There is quantitative

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.