Following
this interesting experiment by those nice people at
Etre, my
curiosity was sparked enough to delve further. Their experiment assessed the navigational behavior of users viewing large
ecommerce web sites, such as Virgin
Megastores.
Through the use of
Etre's eye tracking services, it can be clearly seen that users really weren't paying any attention to the all-important promotional areas of the site, as demonstrated below. See how the "DVDs from £4.99" banner is completely ignored.
I personally believe this reinforces Jakob Nielsen's theory of 'banner blindness' published 8 years ago as part of his
'Top 10 New Mistakes of Web Design'. Nielsen's theory stipulates that "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.
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)."
To
summarise, "classified ads work because as far as users are concerned, they are
content, not advertising: people actively seek out the classifieds when they are looking to buy. This explains the success of eBay, etc. The superiority of Web classifieds portends dire times ahead for traditional printed newspapers, as their most lucrative income source continues to migrate online.
Search engine ads work because search engines are the one type of website that people visit with the explicit goal of
finding someplace else to go. Thus, if users see an ad for what they're looking for, there is a high probability that they'll click that ad. Advertisers can satisfy a user's immediate needs because they target ads based on the user's query terms. (This also explains why ads on search engine homepages don't work: it's impossible to target the ad to the user's current quest until the server knows what that quest is.)"
Lessons to be learned!
Having said that, I'm still going to keep my graphical banner for
Firefox (see right). After all, it's free, and you'll be a much better interweb person for downloading it.
