Banner blindness

Banner blindness is an event in web usability that occurs when the website visitor ignores banner information or the like.

The term "banner blindness" was coined by Benway and Lane as a result of web usability testing where most of the test subjects either consciously or unknowingly ignored the information presented to them in banner. Subjects were assigned tasks to search for information on a website. Information that was overlooked included external advertising banners and internal navigation banners, such as quick links. The location of the banners on the website had little effect on how the subjects noticed it or not. The results of the study contradicted the popular web design guide that web sites with large, colorful and animated elements would be seen most by users.

However, in an experiment by Bayles the results showed that users generally noticed web banners. This was checked by eye tracking tests. The experiment focused on how users perceived a single web page that they could remember and recognize later. It has been argued that experiments like this without real-life tasks have a poor methodology and produce poor results.

Pagendarm and Schaumburg argued that a possible explanation for the banner blindness event rests on how users interact with websites. Users tend to either search for specific information or navigate aimlessly from page to page. Users have built a cognitive scheme relative to the web for different tasks on the web. This hypothesis was also suggested by Norman.

When users search for specific information on a web page, they focus only on parts of the page where they assume the relevant information, eg. small texts and hyperlinks. Banners or large animated graphics in this case are ignored. Usability tests that compare the perception of banners between groups of subjects looking for specific information and subjects navigating aimlessly seem to support this theory.

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