But even with several billion neurons working to process the visual images before us, we miss a lot, Ware points out. It may seem as if we’re taking in the full field of vision that lies before us at any given time, but in fact the eye only sees what is directly in front of it. Through rapid movement (occurring about 3 times per second), the eye constantly jumps from one point of focus to the next. Meanwhile, something important can be happening practically right before our eyes and we may miss it because we’re too busy noticing something else.

 

I think this point is nicely illustrated in a short film, created by the vision researcher Daniel Simons—it’s been around for a while and has been circulated on the web, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s a treat. In the film, people dressed in white pass a ball to one another, while others, wearing black, do likewise. Viewers of the film are instructed to count the number of passes by the team in white. Here’s a link to the clip (and remember, keep track of the number of passes by the team in white).

 

 

Okay, so nobody actually cares how many passes the team in white made. What matters is whether or not you noticed that, in the middle of the film, a person wearing a dark gorilla suit clearly walks into the picture and even waves. If you noticed it, pat yourself on the back—because most viewers don’t see the gorilla at all. They’re too busy keeping an eye on the ball, as instructed.

 

What we can conclude from this, according to Professor Ware, “is that directed attention is everything.” The eye sees mainly what it is conditioned or compelled to seek out. In the case of the gorilla film, specific instructions were provided, but there are other, subtler ways that the eye can be “directed” to look at certain things, says Ware. The key is to provide “findability”—visual stimuli that are easy to separate out and process. The right mix of low-level visual properties such as color, form, and motion (just enough, but not so much as to overwhelm our limited processing capabilities, says Ware) can direct attention. So can anything that seems familiar: a face, a shape, a pattern.

 

Often designers try to direct attention by creating a pattern or “signal” that can be tuned in amid all the visual noise and static. In doing so, they can help us to focus in on what matters and what we really need to know—or, on the other hand, they can distract us from seeing the gorilla in our midst.

 

This power to direct people’s attention becomes increasingly important as the visual landscape grows more cluttered with the images and information that constantly bombard us. (And if you think it’s cluttered now, just wait: By some estimates, there will be a billionfold increase in the amount of visual stimuli hitting us over the next 25 years).

 

If that sounds like a case of “information overload,” it’s actually not. What we’re really swamped with is raw data. For that data to rise to the level of information (by actually being informative to us), it must be organized, simplified, clarified… or, in a word, designed.