Concentrate, You'll Get the Job Done Faster
By Gabe Goldberg, HCIL Media Fellow
Things haven't slowed down since Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit was running late. It's increasingly trendy to discuss, claim to practice, and sometimes simultaneously bemoan multitasking. A recent article claimed that people cram 31 hours into the (still only!) 24-hour day by doing multiple things at once. While it focused on plausible combinations such as watching television and instant messaging, I'm less enthusiastic about people driving and cell phoning, tweaking navigation systems, reading, applying makeup, or shaving.
Some people thrive on multi-tasking: can a teenager get homework done without music playing and multiple instant messaging dialogues open? But if an intrusion causes frustration, distraction, or interruption, the primary task at hand suffers.
Though it's possible to complete routine tasks without much conscious attention -- we've all finished car journeys unable to remember much of what we've seen and done along the way -- knowledge workers must concentrate on their tasks to get them done. A recent paper by the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science's Ben Shneiderman and Ben Bederson describes technology design strategies to let users maintain concentration and notes the manner in which many ubiquitous products fail to do this.
The requirement for concentration has been studied in diverse professional areas such as air traffic control, military systems, and process control rooms. These are characterized by long training periods for operators carrying out complex life-critical tasks requiring low error rates, even under stress. But less is known about maintaining concentration in business-oriented tasks such as writing documents, preparing spreadsheets, and managing databases.
Research shows people delivering peak performance when in the "flow"
state, marked by a high degree of concentration in achieving a clear goal while working at the optimal point of challenge between boredom and being overwhelmed by anxiety. In my earlier days playing pinball and video games I could certainly tune out the world around me, subject only to interruptions for bodily functions and replenishing quarters. And the early television game show Concentration rewarded contestants' ability to focus intently on the game's grid markers.
The authors note that while information and communication technologies can greatly amplify human capabilities, all too often a jagged interface distracts users' attention. The short paper suggests three strategies for software designers to help users maintain concentration.
First, interfaces and displays shouldn't burden users' memory. This simply requires effective display design providing ready access to information needed for making decisions. Compact layouts that reduce scrolling are beneficial, even if their information density is greater. For example, choosing among 100 airline destinations in a 2-D grid is much easier than scrolling through 10 displays of ten items each. Similarly, broader and shallower menu trees are almost always advantageous.
Disruptions interfere with short-term memory, forcing users to spend time and effort recovering their thoughts and momentum before continuing. Minimizing disruptions such as notices of software updates or email arrivals allows uninterrupted work. And since anxiety and frustration also undermine short-term memory, designers must avoid confusing dialog boxes and obscure error messages.
Second, provide information-abundant interfaces. Human visual capacity is remarkable, spotting patterns in complex fields, identifying exceptions in color, shape, or size, and noticing peripheral movement. User-controlled compact displays let users make rapid decisions with minimal distraction. Consistent terminology, layout, color, and action sequences improve performance, as do meaningful groupings and alignment of fields to promote scanning. With more information on each screen, users require less short-term memory and have fewer distractions from navigating among multiple screens.
Third, increase automaticity. Expert users of products such as Emacs or PhotoShop often impress observers with complex sequences done rapidly with minimal conscious thought. Providing rich sets of command key shortcuts lets users keep hands on keyboards to make rapid transitions between text entry and command invocation. Such facilities, of course, require consistency, allowing users to generalize expectations based on experience and successfully intuit what key combinations will do.
The researchers note that some frustrating problems are widely experienced, such as Windows XP's notification balloon. It distracts users trying to concentrate in multiple ways: Since it disappears on its own, users must attend to it immediately or risk not seeing it again; previous notifications can't be retrieved, so users must remember important messages; notifications can't be disabled, delayed, or prioritized; the button to close the balloon is small and not accessible via keyboard; and applications use different notification styles.
Designers and industry should already understand how to resolve irritations and distractions such as cryptic error messages, slow downloads, unintuitive interfaces, poor documentation, and poor training. Shneiderman and Bederson conclude by noting how better interfaces improve user concentration and productivity. Bederson presented this paper at the Designing User Experience (DUX 2005) conference.
