Capturing attention with motion
The experiments reported in this article seriously challenge the common belief that motion captures attention in a stimulus-driven fashion...Motion joins a growing list of features that can guide attention when they constitute a target's defining attribute, but do not capture attention when they are irrelevant to the observer's task...Only when subjects adopt a deliberate state of attentional readiness for attributes like motion, orientation, or color singletons do such attributes guide attention.
Together, the experiments reported here are consistent with the claim that the appearance of new perceptual objects, and little else, captures attention....New objects are automatically assigned high attentional priority.
Anne Hillstrom and Steven Yantis, "Visual motion and attentional capture" Perception & Psychophysics, 1994, 55 (4) 399-411.
Motion outside the Useful Field of View
A concept called the useful field of view (UFOV) has been developed to define the size of the region from which we can rapidly take in information.
The UFOV varies greatly depending on the task and the information being displayed. Experiments using displays densely populated with targets reveal small UFOVs, from 1 to 4 degrees of visual angle.
Essentially, the problem is how to attract the user's attention to information outside the UFOV. For a number of reasons, the options are limited. We have a low ability to detect small targets in the periphery of the visual field. Peripheral vision is color-blind, which rules out color signals. Saccadic suppression during eye movements means that some transitory event occurring in the periphery will generally be missed if it occurs during an eye movement. Taken togtether, these facts suggest that a single abrupt change in the appearance of an icon is unlikely to be an effective signal. Common examples of this are changing the color of an icon and causing the flag on a mailbox icon to be raised. Such events are likely to be missed unless the user includes the icon in an explicit monitoring schedule.Interestly, more recent work has suggested that it may not be motion per se that attracts attention, but rather the appearance of new object in the visual field. Unfortunately, may Web designers generate a kind of animated chart junk: Small animations with no functional purpose are often used to "jazz up" a page.
The presence of these superfluous distractions interferes with our ability to make effective use of moving interrupts.
Colin Ware, Information Visualization p. 160 - 161
Engineering Time and Motion
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Time and Motion as a new Paradigm for Writing
Submission guidelines: Poems that Go publishes Web-specific new media, hypermedia, and electronic poetry, prose, and short narrative. We are open to all forms of multimedia, computer-generated, and interactive work that include (but are not limited to) HTML, Shockwave, Quicktime, streaming media, Flash, Java, and DHTML content. Because Poems that Go focuses on how sound, image, motion, and interactivity intersect with literary uses of the Web, we regretfully do not accept text-based poetry or written work in the traditional sense.
Critical essays about the aesthetics of new media and poetry.
Fluid typography [Time and Motion in Text]
"The impact of fluid documents on reading and browsing: an observational study" P.T. Zellweyer, S.H. Regli, J.D. Mackinlay, B-W Chang. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 2000.
The Fluid Document techniques introduce many dynamic elements: text moves around on the page, grows and shrinks, changes in color, and can overlap. While these animated effects are often seen in television commercials, they have not been common in 'serious' reading interfaces.
This study suggests that care must be taken when designing dynamic documents for reading and browsing. Subject preferences were complex and intense.
Clearly, the increasing use of computer-based documents is changing how we read. Our subjects ignored footnotes, even though they are the conventional way to put details in paper documents. Perhaps, as one subject suggested, Web browsers are training us to ignore text popping up at the bottom of the screen.
In ergonomics, Fitts' law is a model of human movement, predicting the time required to rapidly move from a starting position to a final target area, as a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. Fitts' law is used to model the act of pointing, both in the real world, for example, with a hand or finger and on computers, for example, with a mouse. It was published by Paul Fitts in 1954.