ISSUE-57

qualify your interrupts; communicate subliminally always and through the focus rarely (public comment)

State:

CLOSED

Product:

wsc-usecases

Raised by:

Bill Doyle

Opened on:

2007-04-17

Description:

From public comments
raised by: Al Gilman Alfred.S.Gilman@ieee.org

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-usable-
authentication/2007Apr/0000.html


qualify your interrupts; communicate subliminally always and through the focus
rarely.
where it says, in 10.1.5 Single locus of attention
A user has only a single locus of attention, a feature or an object
in the physical world, or an idea, about which they are intently and
actively thinking. Humans ignore things that aren\'t their current
locus of attention. The user\'s locus of attention is only held in
short term memory and so will be quickly forgotten once their
attention shifts.
please consider
This paragraph sounds as though the security status should be contending for
the user\'s attention along with their main-line task. This could lead to mis-
design.



This principle is likely to mislead the design if not taken with a large grain
of salt. The point here is that the comfort level of the user with the
current context is typically much more unconscious than is their concept of
what they are focused on. Humans react subliminally to stylistic effects that
connote changes in context or context continuity in a way that suffuses many
of these narrow \'loci of attention.\'



You could be about to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Many in the Web
think that interactive behavior and text effects such as color and underline
are \'presentation\' that is disjoint from \'content.\' But nothing could be
farther from the Web truth. Color or underline subliminally communicates what
is clickable to the visual user, and clickability is essential to the user\'s
concept of web browsing. the web would be a laboratory artifact still if this
closure of the interaction cycle through style and behavior weren\'t in place.
And it works without the user ever focusing on it. It plays into pre-focus
scanning behavior.



You have amply demonstrated that just like clickability, trustworthiness is
something that users judge subliminally. Our difficult task is in presenting
a trickle of nuisance events (small enough so they don\'t decide it\'s the boy
crying wolf) that will get them to exercise a modicum more skepticism in the
nick of time.

please consider
event sounds and ShowSounds, introduced before.

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Related emails:

1. Re: ISSUE-57: qualify your interrupts; communicate subliminally always and through the focus rarely (public comment) (from Mary_Ellen_Zurko@notesdev.ibm.com on 2007-04-19)
2. ISSUE-57: qualify your interrupts; communicate subliminally always and through the focus rarely (public comment) (from dean+cgi@w3.org on 2007-04-17)

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