The process by which you get used to these messages and stop paying attention is called habituation. Researchers have known this to be a component of how people respond to computer interfaces for years. But it was always observed indirectly, such as one study that found only 14% of participants noticed changes to the content of the warning messages. Having actual fMRI data to connect to various warning UIs gave researchers a chance to evaluate solutions to this problem.By the third or fourth time your computer pops up a warning box while you’re trying to get something done, you probably just dismiss it without paying it much attention. It turns out this is an almost universal truth of how we use computers, and there’s a neurological aspect. In an attempt to build a better warning message, a team of researchers from Brigham Young University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Google employed a functional MRI (fMRI) to study how the brain reacts to these popups.
The study was conducted in two different ways with a total of 25 participants. In the first experiment, subjects were placed in an MRI machine and shown a series of 560 images to track how their brains reacted to the various error messages. The second experiment was conducted in a more natural setting, with participants sitting at a computer and being shown similar warning messages while their mouse movements were tracked by the millisecond.
The fMRI data showed a clear drop in visual processing after just one repetition of a standard security warning. The drop in activity was more widespread after the participants were exposed to 13 of them. By that point in real life, you’re just blazing through any and all distractions to get something done. Another warning? Who cares? Go away. By the time you’ve been told for the 10th time that a website’s SSL certificate is bad, you just ignore the popup, even though it might have important information one of those times. The conclusion: The physical appearance of important warnings must be changed to ensure people actually process them.
One potential way to make warning messages more effective is with so-called polymorphic design. A polymorphic warning will vary the colors, shapes, opening animation, and layout of a message each time to decrease the effects of habituation. Both the fMRI and mouse tracking experiments showed that habituation was reduced each time the appearance of a warning message was changed.
Developers could learn from this study and improve warnings for everything from SSL errors to weak password notifications. Desktop and laptop computers will probably be easier to implement such systems on, but mobile devices could benefit as well. For example, iOS is often praised for allowing users to enable access to private information on a per-app basis. But that doesn’t matter if no one pays attention to the security prompts.
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