Banner blindness

Many have heard about the “banner blindness effect”. But such a large number of very different rumors and interpretations are wound around this term that often by this term people understand completely opposite things. Without pretending to absolute truth, I will try to describe my opinion on this topic, based on several years of experience in eytracking research.

First of all, we need to remember how human vision works. Vision can be divided into lateral and central. Lateral vision is approximately 190 degrees horizontally and 135 degrees vertically. But the central - only 1-2 degrees. At the same time, we sharply distinguish exactly what the central (it is foveal) vision is directed at. Try to concentrate on some word on this page and follow what you can read without moving your eyes. You will find that you can distinguish text in a spot the size of about one and a half to two centimeters, and everything else begins to blur. This small spot is your central vision. And it is his movement on the page that is tracked during usability studies using eye-tracking technology.

We now turn to banner blindness. People do not like advertising, and when they come to some page of the site for information, they try to find and perceive this information, but do not pay attention to advertising. The question arises: how to separate the necessary information from advertising. And here the previous experience and lateral vision come to the rescue of the site visitor. Having noticed with a side vision a color spot of approximately the same shape as a banner and in a place where banners meet, the visitor subconsciously attributes this spot to the category of advertising and does not direct his foveal vision in that direction.

Actually, it is this effect - non-viewing of banners by the visitor - and is called banner blindness. This effect has one unpleasant consequence that we quite often encounter during our research: if some elements of your site navigation look like an advertisement, then visitors will not notice them either.
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Since the effect of banner blindness is statistical, it is not always easy to calculate. If nobody at all paid attention to the elements subject to this effect, it would be easily tracked in the statistics on the complete absence of transitions, but the low number of transitions usually falls out of sight (pun intended, however). Moreover, if this number has always been low since the launch of the site ...

For example, this is how a heat map view of one of the sites looks like:



At first glance, nothing criminal imperceptibly. But if you highlight areas of interest (top block with announcements, menus, color preview in the middle of the page and the beginning of the content) and see the perception of these blocks in numbers, you can see the following picture:

	Top	Menu	Middle	Content
% of page area	1.4	1.1	2.1	2.9
Time to 1st fixation	4.5	6.2	1.8	5.7
Previous fixings	6	ten	2	eleven
Number of fixations	four	9	6	17
Duration of fixations	1.2	2.1	2.1	4.4
View count	3	four	four	five
Duration of views	1.2	2.3	2.1	4.6

It can be noted that despite the fact that the “Top” and “Middle” areas, due to their location in the center of the page, are noticed rather quickly (the parameters “Time to the 1st fixation” and “number of previous fixations”), they are attract much less attention. Well this is noticeable when comparing the adjacent areas: “Top” with “Menu”, and “Middle” with “Content”.

Most often, banner blindness, in addition to, in fact, banners, affects all sorts of announcements and advertising of internal pages. Moreover, during our research, the difference in the perception of such elements by regular visitors of the resource and newcomers is quite well marked. For example, in the study of one of the major news sites the following results were obtained:

		The average		Median
		Announcement	Menu	Announcement	Menu
Number of respondents who noticed the area (people)	Readers	7	7	7	7
	Newbies	five	9	five	9
Number of fixations	Readers	3.4	3.0	2.5	2.0
	Newbies	0.9	8.1	0.5	6.0
Time to first commit (s)	Readers	7.7	7.3	7.5	8.2
	Newbies	12.5	2.9	12.3	1.1
The duration of fixations (s)	Readers	1.6	1.1	1.4	0.5
	Newbies	0.3	3.0	0.1	2.4
The number of previous fixations	Readers	26.7	15.0	16.0	13.5
	Newbies	61.2	9.5	26.5	5.0
Time from commit to click (s)	Readers	2.8	35.5	3.5	35.5
	Newbies	-	18.9	-	12.1

You can see that regular readers perceive the block with announcements in almost the same way as the menu, but new visitors ignore these announcements.

From the foregoing, the following conclusions can be drawn:

• On banners it is better to use large elements so that they differ in lateral vision - there is a higher chance that they will somehow attract the conscious attention of the visitor.
• We must avoid everything that may seem like an advertisement when designing your site
• It is better to make internal announcements by text and place in the text of the articles or immediately after the article - so that the visitor read them "by inertia"
• Do not neglect testing your sites. Even if you do not have the money or the desire to order testing "on the side", spend half an hour and ask someone else (in no way associated with you or your company, for example, a cyber cafe visitor) to find some information on your site or perform some other action. Even such simple observations are enough to catch the most serious mistakes in usability that you simply do not notice, because your eyes are blurred ...