Maintaining Focus
Focus is to experience as understanding is to information. It’s a result of the mind being successfully engaged and able to comprehend a coherent thread through the experience. Focus and flow are some of the more important considerations for designers working with multimodalities. That doesn’t mean every interaction has to be achieved in a state of extreme, brow-furrowed concentration. Or that modalities must play out in seamless preordained patterns. Far from it. Focus is simply the state of mind that results from things going smoothly. It’s a critical state of mind on the path to successfully achieving an aim.
When we talk about focus, we mean a few things. One is the level of awareness that we have for a particular sensation. Are we able to tune in to something using our senses and extract salient information from it? Is doing so a common practice, familiar to most people (and likely users)? What do we need to maintain this concentration, and how important is it that we do so?
Social interaction
Social interaction is a major component of human behavior, and we have developed sophisticated tools, norms, and expectations around it. Human linguistic ability is so strong that we have multiple modalities for communication. This includes speech, writing, and body language. We can use them in tandem or alone. The relationship between individuals plays a strong role in shaping communication and is also expressed across several multimodal behaviors such as physical proximity, contact, prosody, and even linguistic formality.