Thursday, October 25, 2007

Banner-Blindness

Web users tend to ignore everything that looks like advertisement and, what is interesting, they're pretty good at it. Although advertisement is noticed, it is almost always ignored. Since users have constructed web related schemata for different tasks on the Web, when searching for specific information on a website, they 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.

Banner Blindness
Source: Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings