Most natural blinking visualization?

Question

What is the ideal method for blinking information on a display to draw attention to an error condition in some data in a natural fashion.

• Should the blink be all on / all off, or should there be an aspect of fast ramp up and down of brightness instead of instant on / off transitions?
• Should the blink be equally on and off, or should it be something like 60% time on alternating with 40% time off?
• What is the most natural frequency? How many blinks per second?

The goal is to draw attention to the error in some data, but to look natural and ascetically pleasing.

Hopefully, the solution is not to hard to implement using Qt and C++.

Answer 1

I've always found the highlight effect present in various javascript libraries pleasing. It basically flashes the background of the object a bright-ish yellow immediately, then fades back to the original background color.

Answer 2

Blinking may cause various health problems. Make sure to take a look at this IBM article

Answer 3

I don't think blinking is used much anymore. I personally think it detracts from the attention it's intending on receiving. When I try to focus on the 'important' information that is blinking, the blinking impedes me from actually reading it and focusing on it. If anything is going to blink, perhaps it'd be best to have a border that's blinking, if at all.

Just my opinion, not trying to present it as a fact.

EDIT: Like Adam said, the highlight effect is much nicer, in my opinion. It gets the viewer's attention and then actually lets them do the reading.

Answer 4

Blinking definitely causes readability problems as @Blaenk pointed out. If you must blink, I suggest a long period between blinks: hide for.5 seconds, show for 5 seconds..

Highlighting is definitely more pleasing; however, if the user isn't looking at the screen or that portion of the screen before it fades to the normal color, it may be missed altogether. I would suggest either a very slow/delayed fade, or not fading at all. There's nothing wrong with a static highlight.

Answer 5

For prettiness, I'd use a sinusoidal blink, where the intensity of the "blink" color is varied by a sin wave with a period of about 2 seconds. However, this is much harder to implement than a simple on/off blink, since you'd need to achieve a high frame rate to make the effect appear smooth.

Answer 6

Alternatively, I'm starting to see more and more Flash/Silverlight apps that draw attention through a combination of highlighting followed by a temporary animation of the text growing (increasing font size) followed by decreasing font size back to normal. Do this once, with decent timing and it's enough to draw attention without being too annoying.