When the eye doesn’t catch it…

I noticed I was being charged twice for my hosting account. The first time I noticed the charge, I logged into my account and there it was, 2 hosting accounts under my name. I clicked the checkbox next to the New Account and hit “Cancel”.

Nothing happened. I looked again. I hit “Cancel” again. No change. I was frustrated. It was nearly the end of a long day and I needed to dry my hair. The problem was left dangling.

Then, 2 weeks later, someone reminded me of the problem. I logged into my account again, wanting to tackle the problem quickly. At the same time, I was dialing customer support. After all, I was not a tree growing money.

This time, I went through the same steps. The first click was no surprise, I didn’t notice a change. Then I shifted my focus. Hey, there was something on the right hand site of the screen. And it says “Cancel Account”. I berated myself for not noticing it earlier. But nevermind, by the time I discovered this, the nice customer representative had already canceled the phantom account.

Then, I had to sit down to think about this. This was a serious design flaw in the user interaction. As the button I was clicking was on the left, my eyes were focused on that portion of the screen (check out the red area I outlined in the image below). The change that occurred happened on the right side of my screen, away from my focus. Not only that, on previous pages in my account, the particular location was used to highlight special promotions and advertisements. I, being one of the regular internet users used to being bombarded by advertisements, blocked that area as being irrelevant.

Why, you may ask, well, banner blindness did me in apparently, along with my fixation on the side of the screen I was interacting with.

So, should I never use the right hand side of the screen for any forms, you might ask? Actually, no, that is fine. But just make sure any updates that follows a user interaction stays in within the user’s view (as you can see from my image, it’s a pretty narrow view). Try to make the updates in the center of the gaze.