Banner Blindness - Eyetracking Studies Expose Fancy Formatting
The massive take up of eye-tracking in website usability studies has revealed some interesting information. It’s a phenomenon known as Banner blindness…
Well, it’s not a revelation that website visitors have learned to ignore banners and ads. But, a recent article on Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox shows that banner blindness can spill over into your web content!
An interesting finding from the article was that website visitors often ignored “big red characters.”
If you have an important piece of information that you really want to convey to your website visitors, then follow these three of Jakob’s homepage usability guidelines:
- Don’t use clever phrases and marketing lingo
- Limit font styles and other text formatting
- Don’t look like an ad.
From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.
Yellow Pages® is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.
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