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Designing for Attention
A working session on interfaces that respect the person using them — and what that costs to build.
Words by Sana Chen
This was a working session rather than a talk, which meant the room spent most of its time arguing about a single question: what does it cost to build an interface that does not compete for someone’s attention?
Restraint has a budget
The uncomfortable finding was that calm interfaces are more expensive. Removing a notification means replacing it with a system that decides, correctly, when something genuinely matters. That decision logic is harder to build and harder to maintain than the notification it replaces.
Teams that had done this well described the same trade: fewer surfaces, more thinking per surface. They shipped less, and what they shipped needed less explanation afterwards.
A test worth stealing
One participant described a rule their team uses before adding any interruption: write the sentence the person will say to a colleague after being interrupted. If that sentence is not worth saying out loud, the interruption does not ship.