GTD Wannabe

Banner Blindness is Real

It’s probably a good thing that I’ve given up on most of my advertising streams. It turns out that you don’t read the ads anyway.

Not necessarily *you*, but people in general. There’s a very interesting essay over at Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox (he has the most amazing essays on usability) that discusses the concept of banner blindness.

The term “banner blindness” refers to the fact that when looking at a web page, users just don’t see anything that looks like a banner, including non-advertising elements mixed in with banners.

Here are some key points:

• Three design elements are most effective at attracting you: plain text, faces, and cleavage.
• The concept of banner blindness is not new; it just keeps getting confirmed over and over again
• The best ad format, in terms of getting you to click, is that kind of pop-up ad that looks like a system error dialog box. You know the kind. Most unethical, and yet, most effective.

What really drew me in during the essay was this set of images. These panes show a heatmap of how users look at web pages. The panel on the left shows where the eye focuses during a quick scan. The middle panel shows the eye focus for partial reading. The panel on the right shows where the eye is focused during a thorough reading.

I find it fascinating that, regardless of how closely we read a web page, we don’t look at the banner ads. At all.

Check out Jakob Nielsen’s full essay; it includes a much better write-up, as well as a couple of video clips, showing how a user’s eye movements track during an online task. Fascinating stuff.