Welcome to a six post series on the Calm Tech Institute’s certification categories! In today’s post, we’ll focus an often misunderstood topic: Attention
I’m in a rustic hotel room during a brisk Winter day just outside Hudson Valley, New York. I’m on a writing retreat, but first I need to prepare a few legal documents for my lawyer. I find myself frequently having to re-read the instructions, not fully processing every key detail; this task is taking far longer than I had planned.
I finally identify the source of my frustration: The space heater in my room.
It’s not adequately warming me, but each time I turn to it to adjust the settings, I need to break from reading and focus on the heater controls. This retreat space is beautiful. It’s an older building with rustic appeal. It’s just that the controls aren’t. They’re brand new, with fancy touchscreens that make sharp beeping sounds every time I touch them. With all of this shininess and a hard-to-read display, it takes a good 10-15 seconds of my focus to figure out how to adjust the temperature. It's not that the interface is impossible to figure out, it just takes time. I have to decipher the controls, map them to my hands, and then change the settings appropriately. The same part of my mind that was being used for the my legal document gets swapped out for the complexities of the heater system, and I’ve lost my focus.
Ten seconds might not seem like much of an interruption, but that doesn’t factor in the full tax on my attention. It takes an average of about 23 minutes (23 minutes and 15 seconds, to be exact [PDF] ) to return to the original task after an interruption, according to Gloria Mark, who studies digital distractions at the University of California, Irvine.
So if this heater needs minding four times a day, we’re looking at 92 minutes of potential disruption. All due to poorly designed heater controls that can’t be easily adjusted with minimal interruption or focus.
This is why Attention is a key component of our Calm Tech Institute design standards.
Chronos and Kairos Time
A good way of understanding attention as a design concept is through two of my favorite ways to talk about time.
The ancient Greeks had two words for time:
Chronos is the time of schedules, meetings, and delays.
Kairos, or human time, is what we expect when we’re fully in the moment— alone, or with our friends and family.
A kairos level of attention may only seem ideal for when we’re enjoying company or having fun, but it’s also essential for work: We need full focus to give our best effort to our designated tasks. Trivial interruptions ruin our flow, forcing us to waste time regaining focus. It’s why only a fraction of our time at work is spent on actually being productive. Research consistently points to this pattern.
Or in my specific case, why reviewing a legal document became such a taxing experience.
Applying Design Principles to Optimize for Attention
Returning to the poorly designed space heater, here’s some of the Calm Tech standards which would have helped keep me in kairos time:
CT1.2.3: Fully consistent icon system across the entire interface (both hardware and software). Icon consistency – over 90% of icons must follow a consistent style guide.
The heater had non-uniform icons which didn't make sense. each one seemed like it was from a different aesthetic universe, meaning that the time it took me to parse the information increased.
CT1.3.4: Twenty-thirty percent of display area used as negative space for improved readability. Having enough space to be able to parse a button or action without it being confused with another button or action. And to know whether it is a button and pushable or not.
Instead of being able to know the current temperature at a glance, I actually had to take time squinting at the heater’s cramped display. And because the “buttons” were not actually physical, but part of the touchscreen, I then spent even more time looking for the right one to push.
CT1.4.2: Consistent, intuitive grouping of related elements.
The heater’s related elements were not grouped. The heating and on and off button were separate, requiring a puzzlement over the interface every time.
CT1.4.3: Primary actions clearly stand out from secondary and tertiary actions. Power sleep energy efficient button next to each other.
Every interaction option on the heater, including power, was not outlined or colored.
While I can’t reclaim those 92 minutes in upstate New York lost to a poorly designed heater, this post hopefully illustrates how important designing for human attention is, even or especially in our everyday appliances. Technology that helps us remain in kairos time encourages us to be the best version of ourselves – even when that means being able to rapidly review a legal document, so I can focus on the personal essay I had been planning to write.
Amber Case is the founder of the Calm Tech Institute. Her goal is to help companies design systems that work with human attention, instead of against it. Do you have a product that you’re interested in getting feedback on? Reach out to Amber Case.
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