# Do Background Colors Have an Impact on Preferences and Catch the Attention of Users?
## 1 Introduction
Companies that run advertising campaigns compete for user attention differently than designers of user interfaces, by drawing their attention to call to action buttons (e.g., add to cart, pay, sign up to newsletter) or critical alerts (e.g., tire pressure loss, slippery surface, wrong password). A second question is how to interrupt the user's cognition process such that they notice an important message that shows up in their peripheral perception. The cognition process is understood as a situation where the user is engaged in the task and directs the whole of their focus to this task. Meanwhile, cognitive process interruption is the process when another task (than the one which is the subject of their focus) redirects a user's attention. In such a case, the following questions can be asked: How can the users attention be attracted if they are engaged in another task? Will the color of the visual message interrupt the cognition process and redirect the user's sight to the required target? Will the message be readable? Which colors will attract the user's attention, and which will  
Figure 1: Sustained attention and divided attention in the visual message context. The goal of sustained attention is to hold user’s attention for a longer time during their activity. The goal of divided attention is to break the user’s focus and attract their attention to an important message. hold their sight and allow them to freely read the message? These problems are visually depicted in Figure 2.  
This paper attempts to answer the above research questions, based on an analysis of user behavior in response to simple color messages (composed of two colors: one for the background and one for a pictogram) in a perceptual experiment. In our research, we focus on the simple color messages, understood as graphical user interface components, such as buttons, menus, forms, logos, and pictograms. We did not include user reactions to backgrounds that contain multiple colors, such as website layouts. The main goal of this paper was to determine which colors hold the attention of users for a longer time during their activity, and which colors break the focus of users and attract their attention to an important message. To achieve this goal, a perceptual experiment was conducted (Section 3) and the obtained results were analyzed (Section 4). In Section 5 we discussed the results and finally Section 6 concludes the paper. The main contributions of our work are:  
* The measurement of natural reactions of users related to their first impression, indicating the color composition that first (from displayed pair of images) draws their attention. The users were not familiar with our intention, which enabled us to register bottom-up attention, which is significant in divided attention models. * The measurement of user preferences related to user-friendly, readable color compositions. As the user understood our intention, these preferences correspond to a top-down attention model, which is significant in sustained attention models. * Taking into account the different types of visual attention, we selected those colors that attract the user's divided attention and sustained attention, respectively. The first  
Figure 2: The diversity of graphical user interfaces and their widespread applications require taking different types of user attention into account. Most frequently, the designer develops graphic elements that aim to draw the attention of users (divided attention), to hold their attention (sustained attention) or, sometimes, with both of these intentions. In divided attention (case 1), the visual message aims to draw the user’s attention and be manifestly noticeable among other graphical elements (e.g., error messages, automotive systems). The time that the user’s attention is focused should be short, such that the visual message plays an alerting role and allows them to return to their previous task as quickly as possible.