To be human is to be dis­tract­ed. But by under­stand­ing why, and always keep­ing these 3 prin­ci­ples in mind, you will be able to design for it.

I will make you a promise. You will do some­thing else before you get to the end of this arti­cle. Take a quick peek at an incom­ing text, jump to a web­site open in anoth­er tab of your brows­er, maybe send an email or respond to a Slack mes­sage. To be human is to be dis­tract­ed, but by under­stand­ing why, we will be able to design for it.

Let’s take a look at the break­down of a 24 hour day. What hap­pens in this time­frame?

• 7 hours — Sleep
• 5 hours — Watch­ing Video
• 4 hours — Lis­ten­ing to Audio
• 1.5 hours — Social media
• 0.5 hours — Gam­ing
• 0.5 hours — Read­ing
• 6 hours — Work or school

If you’ve been adding as you go, you will have noticed some­thing. The list above already adds up to just over 24 hours and we’re still not done account­ing for all the things a per­son typ­i­cal­ly does in a day. There are a few more.

• 1 hour — Eat­ing and drink­ing
• 3 hours — Leisure and fit­nesse
• 1 hour — Per­son­al and/or house­hold care
• 2 hours — Cook­ing and shop­ping

This puts us at 31 hours of activ­i­ty in a 24 hour day. Some quick math will tell you that the only way to pull that off is to be doing mul­ti­ple things at the same time.

If we look even clos­er, the fight for atten­tion gets even worse. For those of us design­ing expe­ri­ences across dif­fer­ent chan­nels, not only do we have to wor­ry about some­one get­ting dis­tract­ed by oth­er activ­i­ties, we also have to con­sid­er that the atten­tion peo­ple are will­ing to give us doesn’t tend to go very far on the plat­form they are using in the first place.

Take a look at mobile. Peo­ple use around 27 apps per month on aver­age. At first glance that seems like a pret­ty good oppor­tu­ni­ty for that new app you’re build­ing. In real­i­ty though, 79 per­cent of the time spent is used up by only five apps.

It is a sim­i­lar sto­ry on desk­top web. On a month­ly basis, peo­ple vis­it 96 web­sites, how­ev­er almost half of the time some­one spends online (44 per­cent to be exact) is on only 5 web­sites.

The hard truth is that there is a good chance most peo­ple don’t care about what you are mak­ing, or put a bet­ter way, don’t have the time to care about what you are mak­ing. What they do care about is what kind of impact that thing you made will have on their lives and whether it is good enough for them to switch some of their valu­able atten­tion from one of their cur­rent things to your thing.

So how do we design for the dis­tract­ed? For us, there are three key things we always keep in mind.

1. Benefit Ratio

Utility/ Effort. How much effort will I have to put in to feel like I’ve received an accept­able lev­el of util­i­ty?

Mobile apps are par­tic­u­lar­ly bad at cre­at­ing good ben­e­fit ratios since almost two-thirds of U.S. smart­phone users fail to down­load a new app each month. This is also why mes­sag­ing based UI’s are being hyped so much late­ly. Low effort, high util­i­ty. Addi­tion­al val­ue is being added to an inter­face that most peo­ple are famil­iar with and doesn’t require extra atten­tion or main­te­nance.

Here’s a good exam­ple: the Hilton HHonors app vs. SMS at the Wal­dorf Asto­ria in Orlan­do.

Like many major hotel chains, an app is a means to get details about your hotel and even ask for addi­tion­al items. But also like every app, it is some­thing that takes time to down­load and main­tain so that you can con­tin­ue to use it.

Con­trast that with how the Wal­dorf Asto­ria (iron­i­cal­ly part of the Hilton fam­i­ly of hotels) is using SMS. I didn’t use the app dur­ing this stay, but upon check-in was asked for my mobile num­ber and imme­di­ate­ly engaged by a ‘dig­i­tal concierge’ who was able to address every ques­tion and request I had for the dura­tion of my stay through a sim­ple text.

This is an expe­ri­ence I talk about often, and one that required no effort on my part to ben­e­fit from.

2. Problem Not Product

What prob­lem am I solv­ing with what I am mak­ing? The Adi­das Run Genie is an iPad app that pairs with wear­able tech in the form of shoe pods to eval­u­ate an individual’s run­ning style and rec­om­mend the right shoe for them.

At first glance it would seem that the prob­lem is one of select­ing the right shoe. The real­i­ty is that the prob­lem being solved is that of not being an expert, but want­i­ng to be one. Both as a cus­tomer; want­i­ng to know that they are pick­ing the right shoe from the wall of shoes in front of them and as a sales asso­ciate being able to sug­gest and fit a shoe to some­one that they have just met.

3. Grounded Perspective

Final­ly, we want to make sure we have a ground­ed per­spec­tive.

When we say ground­ed we are refer­ring to find­ing a bal­ance between what the busi­ness is try­ing to do, what its cus­tomers expect to be able to do, and what the tech­nol­o­gy will allow you to do.

For us, this man­i­fests itself strate­gi­cal­ly as a Ser­vice Blue­print and tac­ti­cal­ly through design iter­a­tion, pro­to­typ­ing, and test­ing.

If you’ve read this far with­out actu­al­ly doing what I promised you would do at the begin­ning then it looks like I was able to apply my own advice. On the oth­er hand, if you did do what I promised it proves that the force of dis­trac­tion real­ly is that great and we all need to work real­ly hard at ensur­ing we real­ize each of the three prin­ci­ples.