Attention Design: Seven issues to consider

In HCI research there is a body of work concerned with the development of systems capable of reasoning about users attention and how this might be most eectively guided for specic applications. The design of systems capable of assessing user attention, evaluating the effectiveness of focus of attention and capturing, shifting or maintaining attention, would best be informed by the literatures on attention and performance, psychophysical factors aecting attention, task demands, and an understanding of how errors typically arise and are dealt with in meeting those demands. Current work seeks to establish the relationship between attention, the users task, its situational context, and the users understanding of that context and the expectations this generates. In doing this, we have found it helpful to distinguish between benign situations and errorful situations. Our aim is, through better understanding of attention and its impact on the users ability to extract pertinent information in a timely manner, to extract design principles for supporting user activity.