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10. Anything That Looks Like Advertising

    Selective attention is very powerful, and Web users have learned to stop paying attention to any ads that get in the way of their goal-driven navigation. That's why click-through rates are being cut in half every year and why Web advertisements don't work.

    Unfortunately, users also ignore legitimate design elements that look like prevalent forms of advertising. After all, when you ignore something, you don't study it in detail to find out what it is.

    Therefore, it is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements. The exact implications of this guideline will vary with new forms of ads; currently follow these rules:

• banner blindness means that users never fixate their eyes on anything that looks like a banner ad due to shape or position on the page
• animation avoidance makes users ignore areas with blinking or flashing text or other aggressive animations
• pop-up purges mean that users close pop-up windoids before they have even fully rendered; sometimes with great viciousness (a sort of getting-back-at-GeoCities triumph). I don't want to ban pop-ups completely since they can sometimes be a productive part of an interface, but I advise making sure that there is an alternative way of using the site for users who never see the pop-ups.

 The Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design  

 

 

From Banner Blindness to Box Blindness?

    Text-only ads might continue to work better than traditional graphics-based ads for some time to come. Web users have long exhibited strong banner blindness and avoid anything that looks like an advertisement. Text-only ads don't resemble the designs that people have trained themselves to screen out, and the resulting visibility surely contributes to the success of text-only ads.

Also, text-only ads benefit from a temporary novelty effect, as does any new advertising format that people have not yet learned to ignore.

Over the long term, however, the novelty effect will obviously fade. Users might also develop box blindness, ignoring little text boxes just as they've long ignored banner-shaped areas of the screen. Thus, text-only ads are not guaranteed a bright future outside their native search engine habitat.

 Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule?  

 

>>	Banner Blockers May Kill Your Graphics People visually avoid, but computers can censor!
>>	Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss "Obvious" Links
>>	Banner Blindness, Cognition & Web Design Why on the Web, people do or do not see things.
>>	Testing Web Sites with Eye-Tracking Again, what people see and ignore on the Web.

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E-mail the Webmaster Page Content Updated: May 29, 2003

   

    "The supply-push model of banner ads doesn't work from a user's point of view. The web is demand-pull. Think of it this way: when you go to a site you have made a decision to be there and you are hunting for information (or a good time). You demand information and you seek to pull it form the site. Banners simply get in the way of your information gathering experience. They slow your download, they are flashy and distracting (but not attention grabbing in a positive way), and they eat up valuable screen real estate. Users either hate them or don't care about them; almost no one likes banner ads (unless they created them)."

 John S. Rhodes: Usability Perspective on Banner Ads