Katie Harfner from the New York Times talks about attention and distraction with technology. Operating System makes us easier to multitask, but this also makes us to be more distracted than ever. There are many researches that mentioned by Katie which involve OS and applications features and behaviour that can distract you:
… When scrolling up and down a document on a computer screen, for instance, he said, some software causes the page to jump. It’s an invitation to distraction, in that it requires the eye to reacquaint itself with the document in order to continue reading. To help people understand the importance of avoiding these kinds of jumpy interactions, Dr. Bederson showed that smooth scrolling was not only easier on the eye, but reduced the number of mistakes people make when, say, reading a document aloud…
There are couple of good ideas that researcher has done on emails – it would be interesting how those ideas change to implementation to help us to reduce distractions in computing usage.
You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention – [The New York Times]
