Awareness Test and Inattention Blindness

Today I’m talking about your awareness.

Do you remember this famous YouTube video from 15 years ago?

If you don’t remember this one, click the image or link above and watch it (it’s one minute long) then come back here.

** Spoiler Alert Ahead ***

If you remembered what to look for in this video, then you’ll have to try to recall the state of not knowing (remember the curse of knowledge I wrote about a few weeks ago?)

Because you were told to count the number of passes the white team makes, you did not notice the moonwalking bear.

This is called “inattention blindness” or “change blindness.”

We all have this.

We miss large changes in our visual field, especially when our attention is fixed on something specific.

What This Means For You & Marketing

It means that you can’t make any assumptions about what people see and how they’ll navigate information on your website or anywhere for that matter.

Zero. Zip. Zilch.

Inattention blindness makes it incredibly hard to get your audience to pay attention to the things you want them to pay attention to.

You may assume that:

• Your call to action is obvious.
• Your website is simple to navigate.
• You don’t have too much information on your site.
• You don’t have too little information on your site.

But you could still be creating a moonwalking bear situation.

To improve the chances that you capture the attention of your visitor and get them to take the action you desire, you need to do three things and then repeat consistently:

1. Build
   Write your content, design a landing page for it, and publish it. Then…
2. Measure
   Get the right people to it, and watch how they behave with tools like Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity, etc.
3. Learn
   Learn from the data, screen recordings, etc., and hypothesize changes so you can start optimizing what you’ve built.

Repeat the process.

You may just find where your visitors have inattention blindness – where you are holding them back from taking the next desired action to becoming a new customer.