Maintaining attention during the tutorials

This week I’m trying to figure out what type of study I can run which can improve the tutorials from the remix process. I’ve been looking into attention research as part of this process. So far this is really new territory for me and it’s been quite challenging. Most of the resources I find are somehow related to ADHD which isn’t exactly what I’ve been looking into. However, I did find a great resource from the library: “The Psychology of Attention”. So far what I’ve learned is that if people are told to be focusing on one thing, they will rarely be able to tell you much detail about the rejected stimulus. This may have some implications for how we design the tutorials. We need to clearly focus attention on something. I can also say, after reading Chapter 2, I see why the yellow note presented after the character recasting process doesn’t work very well. Our users are not expecting it and so their attention is elsewhere, and given that the rejected stimulus is frequently ignored… this shouldn’t be so surprising. So I think I may need to do a better job at setting up expectations.

Further, I’ve now moved on to looking at distraction. I don’t have much to say about this topic at the moment. But so far this mini-investigation has really sparked some ideas in my head. I’m excited to see where this goes.