Banner blindness

Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors on a website ignore banner-like information.

The term "banner blindness" was coined by Benway and Lane (1998) [http://www.internettg.org/newsletter/dec98/banner_blindness.html] 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 (2000) [http://www.surl.org/usabilitynews/22/banners.asp] the results showed that users generally noticed web banners. This was proven by e.g. eye-tracking tests. 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 [ [http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html banner blindness at useit] ] .

Pagendarm and Schaumburg (2001) [http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/jodi-37/38] 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 (1999) [http://www.internettg.org/newsletter/mar99/commentary.html] . When searching for specific information on a website, users focus only on the parts of the page where they would assume the relevant information could be, i.e. small text and hyperlinks. 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.

ee also

*Inattentional blindness
*Conditioning
*Habituation
*Topics in human-computer interaction
*Usability testing
*Web design
*Click-through rate

References

*Benway, J. P., Lane, D. M., [http://www.internettg.org/newsletter/dec98/banner_blindness.html "Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss "Obvious" Links"] , 1998, Internet Technical Group, Rice University
*Norman, D. A., [http://www.internettg.org/newsletter/mar99/commentary.html "Commentary: Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design"] , 1999, Internet Technical Group
*Pagendarm, M., Schaumburg, H., [http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/jodi-37/38 "Why Are Users Banner-Blind? The Impact of Navigation Style on the Perception of Web Banners"] , 2001, Journal of Digital Information
*Kitovitsu, John, [http://www.bannerblindness.com 'How to create banners that dont appear blind to your customers'] Dead link|date=September 2008, 2008, Online marketing and web development blog