Invisible Gorillas & Passing Doors
“Watch the video and count how many times the players in white pass the basketball.” -Daniel Simons
Sounds pretty simple, I mean the video is only 1 minute and 21 seconds long… how many times can they really pass the ball in that time period? What’s most interesting about this video is that during an experiment where subjects were asked to do just this, count the number of times the team in white passed the ball, nearly 50% of them did not notice the gorilla in the video… did you?
Now, watch this short video (1:36) about an experiment from Simons & Levin (1998) where 50% of subjects didn’t notice when the person they were talking to was replaced by someone else.
Why does this happen, and why should I care as a Designer?
As described in Jeff Johnson’s book, Designing with the Mind in Mind, the phenomenons happening in these videos, respectively, are labeled inattentional blindness and change blindness. This is when “an event happens, the few details about it that we notice and remember later are usually those that were important for our goals at the time of the event” (Johnson, 2014).
The important takeaway for designers is the importance of understanding our users’ goals during each step of our design and to make any changes obvious drawing the user’s attention to that change. For example, if we are trying to alert the user that there was an error but it is not obvious, users may not notice the message if their attention is focused somewhere else.