TL;DR: People don’t notice most of what’s in front of them. Due to change blindness and limited attention, users only perceive what aligns with their goals. Visibility doesn’t guarantee awareness—relevance does.
The Myth
“If it’s in front of my eyes, I’ll notice it.”
As marketers, we tend to believe that visibility equals impact: If the CTA is bigger, the colour pops, or the design is cleaner, surely users will see it. And if they don’t, the fix must be another iteration: tweak the layout, animate the button, ship a redesign.
The underlying assumption is that people perceive the world more or less as it is. That attention is broad. That users scan, absorb, and consciously register what’s in front of them.
The Reality
Brace yourself.
The brain does not construct a full, high-resolution model of the world. Instead, it samples a few elements it deems important, then fills in the rest. Anything outside that narrow attentional spotlight may as well not exist.
The result? We routinely fail to notice large, obvious changes happening right in front of us.
For marketers, this means customers don’t experience your brand, site, ad, or product the way you do. They experience a stripped-down version shaped by their goal, expectations, and mental load. Anything that doesn’t align gets edited out — not consciously ignored, but never perceived in the first place.
The Research
Change blindness emerged from cognitive psychology in the 1990s and early 2000s. In classic experiments, participants failed to notice:
- Major differences between alternating images (“flicker” experiments)
- A person being swapped mid-conversation
- Objects appearing or disappearing in plain sight
Here are a few great demos if you want to feel uncomfortable about your own perception:
More recent research extends these findings into real-world contexts:
- Eye-tracking studies show users fixate on surprisingly little of a page — often just 20–28% of visible content, with large areas receiving no attention at all.
- UX and HCI research shows task focus drastically narrows perceptual bandwidth. Users literally do not see elements unrelated to their immediate goal.
- Advertising studies (2020s) suggest that highly stylised or emotional ads can be less noticeable because they fit the brain’s “this is an ad” template and get automatically filtered out.
Visibility, it turns out, is a terrible proxy for awareness.
The Implications
Relevance beats novelty: People notice what helps them achieve their goal. Not what’s clever, loud, or aesthetically impressive.
More visibility ≠ more attention: Size, colour, and contrast only help if they intersect with what the user is already attending to.
Subtle optimisations often fail silently: Tiny UI tweaks, microcopy changes, or “polish passes” may go completely unnoticed unless paired with an attentional reset.
Context switching matters: Interruptions (emails, notifications, in-app prompts) work not because they’re persuasive, but because they forcibly redirect attention. That’s powerful — and dangerous.
Defaults and habits dominate behaviour: When attention is limited, people stick with what they already know. This is where change blindness intersects with status quo bias.
Closing Thoughts
As marketers, our job isn’t to demand attention — it’s to meet people where their attention already is.
If you want to capture attention and drive real results, you have to earn it by being relevant, timely, and simple. Otherwise, all the optimisation in the world might be happening in plain sight…
