We haven’t talked tools in a while, so this week felt like a good time to fix that. My own attention has been bouncing around a bit lately, from climbing in West Virginia to heading west this week to Indianapolis for a couple of sessions and a book signing at ATD Core 4. Which makes this week’s topic oddly appropriate: tools that can predict where people’s attention will go before they ever see your slide, image, or design. Turns out attention is slippery. Thankfully, we can test it.

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If you’re on a lean L&D team, you know the drill: big requests, tight deadlines, and somehow an SME’s 87-slide deck just landed in your lap. That’s why I like what iSpring is doing with its free L&D Launch Bootcamp. Over three weeks, they’ll tackle real-world challenges like mass onboarding, training frontline workers without personal devices, and turning raw SME content into something people can actually use—with live workshops, networking, and practical templates you can take straight back to work.

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Are People Looking Where You Think They Are?

Here’s a slightly uncomfortable question:

When you put something important on a slide, how do you know people will actually look at it?

Most of the time, we don’t. We make the headline bigger, add contrast, move things around, and maybe ask a coworker what they think. Then we look at it and say, “Yep. That feels right.”

Not exactly rigorous.

When researching the book, I discovered a category of tools that makes this much more interesting: predictive attention testing. These tools use models trained on eye-tracking data to predict what people are likely to notice first in a visual.

Upload a slide, ad, webpage, graphic, or screenshot, and you get a heatmap showing where attention is likely to go. Some tools can even predict the order in which people will look at things.

That’s where this gets especially useful for learning designers.

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Attention Comes Before Learning

Before someone reads your carefully crafted explanation, their brain is already sorting the scene: face, big number, bright color, headline, logo, chart. Whatever is loudest gets first crack at attention.

In Dual-Process terms, System 1 gets there first. That matters because the visual hierarchy we intend may not be the visual hierarchy people actually experience.

You may think your slide says:

73% → chart → key takeaway

But the learner may actually experience:

stock photo → decorative icon → logo → chart → 73%

That’s not a learning problem yet.

It’s an attention problem.

And if the eye doesn’t go where it needs to go, the message is already fighting uphill.

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Test It Before You Ship It

A few tools make this surprisingly easy. They work a little differently, but they all help answer the same question:

Is attention going where I intended?

3M Visual Attention Software

Best for: Quick visual attention checks

Predicts what is likely to get noticed first and lets you compare that with the areas you intended to emphasize.

Why it’s useful: A fast preflight check for slides, graphics, ads, and other static visuals.

Attention Insight

Best for: Heatmaps + attention scores

Shows predicted heatmaps, Focus Maps, and attention percentages for specific areas of a design.

Why it’s useful: Helps reveal important elements that may be getting overlooked.

Brainsight

Best for: Deeper attention analysis

Adds gaze plots and predicted viewing order, so you can see not just what gets noticed, but in what sequence.

Why it’s useful: Helps answer a better design question:

Does attention move through this visual in the order I intended?

Microsoft Clarity

Best for: Seeing what real users actually do

Clarity is a little different. Instead of predicting attention before launch, it shows how people actually behave on a live website.

Think of it this way:

Predictive attention tools = before launch​
​Microsoft Clarity = after launch

Both are useful. They just answer different questions.

Try This With One Slide

Take a slide you’ve already created and write down the first three things you want people to notice. Maybe it’s the headline, a key number, and a chart.

Now run the slide through one of these tools and compare the prediction with your list. If they match, great. If they don’t, don’t explain the slide harder.

Fix the hierarchy.

Reduce competing elements, increase contrast where it matters, and tone down anything stealing attention from the main point. Then test it again.

That’s a much better design loop.

It also connects directly to an idea Bianca and I explore in Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro: ​

Bottom Line

Good visual design isn’t just about making something look polished. It’s about directing attention on purpose.

For years, we’ve relied on instinct, experience, and design principles to do that. Those things still matter, but now we can pressure-test our assumptions.

Sometimes the heatmap tells you something your eyes didn’t.

Your challenge: Test one slide this week and ask yourself:

Is the eye going where I want it to go?

📍Where I'll be next

• ​Training 2027 Conference & Expo,
  February 22-24 Orlando, FL

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