Abstract
Digital distractions in decreasing people’s attentional abilities have become a subject of increasing concern and scrutiny in recent years. Based on the existing literature regarding the negative impact of technology on attention, this paper examines various solutions, encompassing mostly reactive strategies. It also questions the prevailing design practices prioritising learnability and efficiency and proposes a shift towards designing interactions that minimise distractions and promote sustained attention while emphasising the negative consequences of distraction-prone interactions on users’ attentional resources. As a proactive solution, we present a novel interaction strategy called “Attention mode,” which selectively reduces distractions when using apps. We developed three prototypes that consistently incorporate this strategy, each used in a different application on a different device: a news website on a desktop, an e-book reading app on a tablet, and a video-watching app on a smartphone. We conducted usability testing with 13 participants to evaluate this design feature and address the implications of these in the interaction design knowledge and practice today. By advocating for considering users’ attentional abilities in design, this work contributes to the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and calls for a balance between cognitive well-being and traditional usability criteria.
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Notes
- 1.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
- 2.
“↑” icon refers to improvement in attention and executive control whereas “↓” refers to deterioration.
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Acknowledgement
This work was conducted with the financial support of the SFI Centre for Research Training in Digitally-Enhanced Reality (d-real) under Grant No. 18/CRT/6224 and the SFI Centre Grant No. 12/RC/2289_P2 at Insight the SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics at Dublin City University. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.
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Hacioglu, N., Leva, M.C., Lee, H. (2023). Re-designing the Interaction of Day-to-Day Applications to Support Sustained Attention Level. In: Kurosu, M., et al. HCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Papers. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14054. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48038-6_23
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