Harder to Ignore? Revisiting Pop-Up Fatigue and Approaches to Prevent It

At SOUPS 2013, Bravo-Lillo et al. presented an artificial experiment in which they habituated participants to the contents of a pop-up dialog by asking them to respond to it repeatedly, and then measured participants’ ability to notice when a text field within the dialog changed. The experimental treatments included various attractors: interface elements designed to draw or force users’ attention to a text field within the dialog. In all treatments, researchers exposed participants to a large number of repetitions of the dialog before introducing the change that participants were supposed to notice. As a result, Bravo-Lillo et al. could not measure how habituation affects attention, or measure the ability of attractors to counter these effects; they could only compare the performance of attractors under high levels of habituation. We replicate and improve upon Bravo-Lillo et al.’s experiment, adding the lowhabituation conditions essential to measure reductions in attention that result from increasing habituation. In the absence of attractors, increasing habituation caused a three-fold decrease in the proportion of participants who responded to the change in the dialog. As with the prior study, a greater proportion of participants responded to the change in the dialog in treatments using attractors that delayed participants’ ability to dismiss the dialog. We found that, like the control, increasing habituation reduced the proportion of participants who noticed the change with some attractors. However, for the two attractors that forced the user to interact with the text field containing the change, increasing the level of habituation did not decrease the proportion of participants who responded to the change. These attractors appeared resilient to habituation.