Banner Blindness

While browsing Mr. Nielsen’s articles, I came across the most recent one that reports on an eyetracking study that reconfirm previous studies’ findings that banner blindness really does exist.

Results show that users don’t fixate on ads (in the green boxes in the image above) or or things that look like ads but aren’t, when looking at a webpage. The heat maps above also show that whether users are scanning, reading partially or reading thoroughly the content of a page, the results are the same.

Mr. Nielsen hesitates to add another finding, which he feels can be used for unethical means. That is that the more an ad looks like it is part of the content of the page, the more likely it is that users will see it and interact with it.

I think that if an ad flows well with the rest of the page content both aesthetically and in terms of relevance, the page as a whole will be a lot more pleasing to look at and users will indeed be more likely to pay attention to the ads, as they may be seen as additional resources for the information they are looking for. But I definitely think that Mr. Nielsen has an excellent point in that this technique may be take too far to try and masquerade advertisements as content, and that’s just wrong. You’ll get interaction, but you’ll also get a pissed off user who won’t want to return to a site where they have been deceived.

So take these results and use them with care to add value and relevance to your page.