A usability study by The Nielsen/Norman Group (June 2006) highlights (literally) the importance of “breaking through the clutter,” or in this case, “content.” The study uncovered a phenomenon called ‘Banner Blindness’ where users focus almost exclusively on the content of a page and ignore the banners.
As you can see, the diagram shows a F-shaped pattern for reading web content also revealing that users primarily focus on introductions and bulleted content. There are significant implications for marketers who are not only seeking engagement, but also sheer exposure. Because of this tendency to focus more on content, we as marketers must continue to develop innovative and creative ways to attract customers.
Chris Portella
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I’d love to get my hands on one of those Eyetrackers.
Duh. As if “users” are going to websites to look at ads. Are you retarded, or did you just start using the web, like five minutes ago?
Meh.. When information like ads and unnecessary pictures start to clutter my screen, I tend to make them go away, be it via an ad-blocking utility on my web browser, or just rig my local DNS server to point to a different ip of my choosing where I can just have it display a 404, or custom 404 web page so I don’t have to see it at all. The DNS one would be for sites on my shitlist that I have no interest in evering seeing. On the plus side, any pc that uses this dns server will also not have to look at these sites. For more complicated setups, proxy servers can do the same.