You’re more likely to develop computer vision syndrome if you view a digital screen for 2 or more hours in a row. That’s because the text on digital screens isn’t as sharp as the words on a printed page.Īlso, digital screens are prone to having glare, making it even harder for your eyes to focus properly. When you look at a digital screen, your eyes need to work harder to focus. This includes digital screens on devices like: It’s caused by focusing on a digital screen for a long time. This is why you should test with real users.Computer vision syndrome, also known as digital eye strain or computer eye strain, is a condition that can cause specific vision and eye problems, such as: They know which information is important - in our example, the year - and thus focus on it when analyzing the layout. Web page designers don't have the same problem. It's only human: focus on a few things and ignore the rest. They'd also be more likely to overlook something important, such as a big-toothed predator sneaking up on them. Selective attention is really a survival instinct if people had to pay attention to all stimuli in the environment, they'd never get anything done. We've recorded countless other examples in the category of banner blindness alone. The tunnel vision example from this latest study is just one in a pile of thousands we've observed in recent years. Low-vision users who employ a screen magnifier to blow up a small section of the screen are much more likely to understand the information when it's all in one place. This design is also better for accessibility. Here's a quick example of how this might be done in our example:Īlternative design (not tested) positions the most important information within the user's likely field of vision. The solution to tunnel vision usability problems is to position related items close together.

She didn't see the year at the upper left. The user read through the entire body text before finding the year in the last line. seems quite prominent in this design: '2000' sits in the upper left of the box in a larger font size than the other information.Īnd? The design didn't work. The answer to the user's problem - the year Westfield entered the U.K. Most stories on a corporate site are presumably about the company, so it's better to reserve the crucial first 2 words for keywords that carry more information.) (To pick nits, don't start a headline with a company's name on that company's own website. Strong tunnel vision prevented the user from noticing the year at the top of the pop-up.Įach entry was nicely designed, with the year, an attractive photo, a reasonably well-written headline, and a short summary of that year's major events. Users easily navigated the timeline by clicking the various controls (which I'm not showing here, because they don't matter for the topic at hand). Although this was perhaps an overly aggressive design choice, it certainly worked. Each event in the company's history was shown in a lightbox-style pop-up. Westfield was reasonably compliant with guidelines for presenting a corporation's image on the Web in an 'About Us' area, and the user had little trouble finding relevant information. market and carefully stepped through the timeline in the company's history section.

One user was trying to find out when Westfield entered the U.K. We saw a clear example of this user tunnel vision in Australia earlier this month, when we tested users in Sydney on the corporate website of Westfield, a retail property developer. They often stay highly focused on the screen section that they're engaging with or that they assume contains the answer to their problem.

How can people overlook something that's right there on the screen? If you've ever observed a usability study, you've probably had many occasions to ask yourself this question.

Computer screen tunnel