41. People Habituate to Information

41. People Habituate to Information

• Habituation is a decrease in response to stimulus after repeated or prolonged exposure. Habituation can helpful or dangerous as people can become primed to react a certain way, when a series of events occur that follow the pattern they have trained for.
• An example of helpful habituation is psychotherapy and the use of exposure therapy to overcome phobias or trauma by slowly exposing the person to the thing they fear.
• A dangerous example of habituation is when a U.S. Navy ship fired on a civilian aircraft in the mistaken belief that it was a hostile military plane. People find what they are looking for the and the soldiers were primed to react to a hostile plane. The saying “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is rather apt here.

Takeaways

• Don’t expect that people will necessarily pay attention to information you provide, especially if they have habituated to certain information and patterns of action.
• Don’t make assumptions. What is obvious to you as the designer may not be obvious to the people using what you’ve designed.
• If you think people might be habituating and not noticing that information has changed, then use color, size, animation, video, or sound to draw attention that what’s different.
• If it’s critical that people pay attention to certain information, make that information stand out 10 times more than you think is necessary.