What Eyes Want - Christopher Butler

As it turns out, much of design is about capitalizing on that gap. In the design of objects, understanding the careful balance of mind-body coordination is what makes for useful ones. A good object is not one that you want to be rid of, nor one that functions best when you are distracted. And yet, in the world of visual media, distraction has been

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 “

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.