Banner blindness

Standard web banner ad sizes

Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or subconsciously ignore banner-like information, which can also be called ad blindness or banner noise.

The term "banner blindness" was coined by Benway and Lane[1] as a result of website usability tests where a majority of the test subjects either consciously or unconsciously ignored information that was presented in banners. Subjects were given tasks to search information on a website. The information that was overlooked included both external advertisement banners and internal navigational banners, e.g. quick links. The placement of the banners on a web page had little effect on whether or not the subjects noticed them. The result of the study contradicted the popular web design guideline that larger, colourful and animated elements on a website are more likely to be seen by users.

However, in an experiment by Bayles[2] the results showed that users generally noticed web banners. This was proven by eye-tracking tests and other means. The experiment concentrated on how users perceived a single web page and what they could recognise and recall of it afterwards. It has been argued that experiments like this without real-world tasks have poor methodology, and produce poor results.[3] Other eye-tracking tests showed different results.[4]

Pagendarm and Schaumburg [5] argued that a possible explanation for the banner blindness phenomenon lay in the way users interacted with websites. Users tend to either search for specific information or aimlessly browse from one page to the next. Users have constructed web related cognitive schemata for different tasks on the web. This hypothesis was also suggested by Norman.[6] When searching for specific information on a website, users focus only on the parts of the page where they assume the relevant information will be, small text and hyperlinks.

Bad marketing and ads that are not correctly targeted make it more likely for consumers to ignore banners that aim at capturing their attention. This phenomenon called 'purposeful blindness' shows that consumers can adopt fast and become good at ignoring marketing messages that are not relevant to them.[7] It is a byproduct of inattentional blindness.

Large, colourful or animated banners and other graphics are in this case ignored. Usability tests that compared the perception of banners between groups of subjects searching for specific information and subjects aimlessly browsing seem to support this theory.

See also

References

Notes
  1. ↑ Benway, J. P., Lane, D. M., "Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss 'Obvious' Links", 1998, Internet Technical Group, Rice University
  2. ↑ Bayles, Michelle. "Just How 'Blind' Are We to Advertising Banners on the Web?". Usabilty News 22, v.2 n.2 (July 2000), Wichita State University Software Usability Research Laboratory website
  3. ↑ Nielson, Jakob. "Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings" (August 2007) on useit.com
  4. ↑ http://www.businessinsider.com/eye-tracking-heatmaps-2014-7
  5. ↑ Pagendarm, M., Schaumburg, H., "Why Are Users Banner-Blind? The Impact of Navigation Style on the Perception of Web Banners", 2001, Journal of Digital Information
  6. ↑ Norman, D. A., "Commentary: Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design", 1999, Internet Technical Group
  7. ↑ de Ternay, Guerric. "Purposeful Blindness: How Customers Dodge Your Ads". BoostCompanies. Retrieved March 28, 2016.
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