[When live, this screen is a movie of the animating Flickr Daily Zeitgeist widget. It can be seen, in motion, on its homepage.]
There are two major movements happening here. The first is that a picture, a big thumbnail, slowly fades in. Once it’s done that, it hangs around so you can see it, then shrinks down into the regular size tile. There it goes. Then it repeats.
What happens while we’re reading the page? While I’m talking, why not look just to the side of the screen and see if you can feel this?
The picture fades it—it doesn’t grab your attention, the radar misses it. It sits there… and bang, it goes. It shrinks quickly, and grabs your attention. It grabs your attention, and your eyes move. That takes a tenth of a second, so by the time you’ve got there, the picture is the normal size, nothing is happening, you don’t know what grabbed you… so you go back to reading.
And another picture fades it, we begin again.
You end up missing the picture when it’s at the size you really want to see it, and the time it takes to be grabbed means you’re too late to even tell what’s new. It’s frustrating!
Anyway, sorry about that.
Just to finish up about attention and focus. There’s a whole physics waiting to be told about how attention works. About how it takes time to relinquish it, and its momentum on how it moves around and tries to help you out with ignoring things. It’s enormously important. Probably it’s only that enormously important if you’re designing jet place interfaces for the military, but you get the picture. The rough workings of it are still important for us.