Changes

People are using social media more and more to be one of their primary means of communicating with other people. One of the major social media sites used by people is Facebook which, as of September 2011 (according to Wikipedia), has 800 million active users. Facebook is always introducing new features to allow people to keep in contact with others. Some of these features include instant chat between friends as well as small pop-up notifications and news feeds which inform the user about their friends activities. With all these features that Facebook developers are implementing, are they truly necessary and do the users who use Facebook actually make use of these features or are the developers spending their time developing features that for the typicaly Facebook user, they would never notice?

In the late 1970s, the first research into the new recognized phenomenon, change blindness began. According to Wikipedia, “change blindness is a normal phenomenon of the brain which show in light that the brain does not have a precise representation of the world but a lacunar one, made of partial details.” (Change Blindness wiki). In spite of its name, change blindness does not have to do with a person’s eyes but in fact how the brain perceives information. Research in this phenomenon is still fairly new, however the research “suggests that the brain estimates the importance and usefulness of informations prior to deciding to store them or not. Another issue is that the brain cannot see a change happening to an element that it has not yet stored” (Change Blindness wiki). Many examples of change blindness can be found by simply searching on YouTube. An example of chance blindness on YouTube was a scenario where several people, one-at-a-time entered an office, we’ll call them candidates, and someone behind a counter, we’ll call them the employee, handed them a simple survey to fill in. Once the survey was completed and returned to the employee, the employee would duck behind the counter to file the survey. While the employee was ducked behind the counter, another employee would stand back up, in the same location as the first employee, and gave them a form and asked the candidate to walk down the hall. Once the candidate walked down the hall, someone asked them how many employees did they deal with at the counter. All the candidates said that they dealt with one employee. The person at the end of the hallway had to inform all the candidates that they were all incorrect and explained that the employees switched halfway through the survey process.

When we first were introduced to change blindness in our BTH740 - Human Factors in Computing course at Seneca College and looked at change blindness videos online, we just found it to be fascinating phenomenon. As someone watching these videos or hearing stories, we couldn’t believe that people could have something major change in front of them, but because they were so focused on something else, typically something even smaller, they didn’t notice the big picture changing. With this in mind, we started thinking about how software systems are very dynamic and may contain several sections of a page automatically updating and being modified at once. We started wondering if change blindness would have any affect on the software that we will be writing in the future. When we were thinking of the future, we started thinking about the present and whether we might even be unaware of change blindness in software or other systems that we used currently. That is when we started wondering if even while we are using Facebook if there might be things that occur on the screen that we are completely unaware occured.