Attention residue hurts your designs

Ever been on a website running a search, reading a page, filling a form, comparing products — and out of nowhere, you get a Slack notification about leftover cookies in the lunchroom? When you get there, you are sucked into a conversation. On your way back to your desk, you swing by the bathroom, where you fill the awkward silence between you and a colleague with equally awkward pleasantries. Just as you sit down and nudge your computer from its slumber, a friendly face pops in and asks you a “quick question.”

Either you carried the cognitive load of the unfished task across the office and half-performed the string of subsequent tasks, or you walked around the office with an unsettling feeling that something wasn’t quite finished. If you don’t fall into either of those two categories, then you are likely a psychopath. Just kidding. There are many other scenarios that can explain what happened between your ears from when your butt left your seat to when it returned. But we are most interested in the “half-performing” scenario here.

Sophie Leroy, a professor at the University of Washington, studied the “effect of regulatory focus on attention residue and performance during interruptions” or “attention residue” in a study published by Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes journal.

In her paper, Leroy finds that task interruptions shreds productivity. I know, shocker. What’s interesting about her research, however, is why, specifically, productivity plummets when a task is interrupted and what to do about it.

There is nothing but interruptions on the web

This should be interesting to UX designers because there is nothing but interruptions on the web as a user moves through a task.

In her study, Leroy explores how when we are interrupted, the new thing we take on next is only benefiting from a fragment of our attention as we continue to carry the cognitive load of the unfinished task. Folks shouldering attention residue are more or less “functioning with a reduced cognitive capacity,” according to Leroy. In the end, making everything we do until the initial task is closed out less than perfect or ideal.

Much like economists insist that to cancel debt more effectively, we should focus on paying off one credit card, and then move on to the next one, and so on until we’ve canceled all your debt, the research suggests that allowing someone to wrap up a task before starting a new one is a more effective way of moving through the day.

Clearly, that’s just bananas, so, alternatively, Leroy suggests to offload the cognitive burden of the unfinished task by writing yourself a note with just enough information to snap you back into where you were before you were interrupted.

“If people, when they are interrupted, take a few seconds to write down where they are on that task and, more importantly, the steps they want to take when they go back to that task, it’s going to help them switch their attention,” Leroy wrote.

Ok, sounds good, but can you imagine a reasonable scenario where a web user would write down where they left off before jumping to a new task?

I can’t.

So the question is: how do we help users remember what they were doing before they were pulled away?

Website memory

A theoretical* answer to this question is “website memory.”

We can code a script that “remembers” the last five seconds (or interactions) of the user journey through the website. Analytics packages and some UX analytics tools already keep track of many user interactions. So, as invasive or creepy as this might initially sound, keeping track of user interactions across a website is more or less already happening.

What I am suggesting here is that we don’t just keep track of the interactions, but we also play them back after a certain time lapse of inactivity (the interruption).

While this approach doesn’t necessarily offload the cognitive load from the unfinished task, it does help the user remember where they left off, virtually taking a “note” and acting as an automatic reminder when they return.

What’s interesting about this concept is that it’s supported by one of Don Norman’s concepts of where knowledge exists: in the head and in the world. In his seminal book, The Design of Everyday Things, he argues that when knowledge is in the world, users don’t have to remember as many things.

And, that ladies and gentlemen, is ostensibly offloading cognitive overhead.

The bigger picture: neurodesign

All of this rolls up to Neurodesign. There is a lot more to this emerging field than what you’ll find here. Many Neurology and neurophysiology research is actively conducted while designers (like me) find ways to translate those insights to create designs that emote joy, project simplicity, and drive action.

Check out the Neurodesign reading list.

“Theoretical” because I’ve asked around and I’ve searched high and low for examples of this idea, but no dice. It seems like this hasn’t been done on the web. I did hear from a close friend and developer maven that there was a Pokemon game cerca 2004 that at all new gameplays, it would playback the last few seconds of the last game. I couldn’t find a video or an example of this, maybe you can help me track it down?