Change Blindness - why we don’t see what designers expect us to see - especially if you older

I have found that web designers can be the most infuriating people. They spend ages worrying about getting the smallest of features correct and gloss over creating significant problems for the site users.

One of the errors they make is ignoring Change Blindness. This is our inability to notice when something changes about an existing image.

People often overlook new visual details added to an existing image. This change blindness can affect critical information such as error messages and navigation menus, leading to user confusion and task failure.

Luckily, you can do something about it to reduce the likelihood of change blindness. The first thing is to do is read this article from NNg.

If you want to experience Change Blindness in action have a look at the video of the ageing face. You will see that it takes some time before your are aware how much change has occurred. If you want a more scientific demonstration of this type of blindness take this test. 

We all suffer from this issue but it impacts older people more. If you want to the proof have a read of this article.

So if you are a designer or know one, make sure that Change Blindness is taken seriously and doesn't impact the customer experience of your older consumers. Dick Stroud