Attention is limited, and your product is competing with everything else in a user’s day. If something is not clearly worth their attention right now, their brain will filter it out before they even think…

pretty much

your brain hates blank space, so it fills it with the nearest sample: you

Herbert Simon wrote about this in 1971, long before the internet made it feel urgent.

think of it like designing a hotel room while standing in your own bedroom. everything feels obvious because you know where your socks are

annoyingly, no

asking helps, but the chapter is warning you about the gap between what feels true and what survives contact

Before any notification goes out, before any modal launches, before any badge gets added to a tab, ask one question: what was this person doing before this moment…

yep. attention is limited is the trap door

then it shows up as split attention weakens every message

Daniel Kahneman’s 1973 work on attention showed that attention is not a spotlight you aim wherever you want.

make the hidden assumption visible before the review starts

then test the behavior, not just whether the room nods

and if a choice only works for informed, patient, caffeinated people, treat that as a bug

that’s the series tbh

design psychology is mostly noticing the human nonsense before it ships

deal. hydrate first