Banner Blindness: The Irony of Attention Grabbing on the World Wide Web

Web designers attempt to draw attention to important links by making them distinctive. However, when users are asked to find specific items, they often overlook these distinctive banners. The irony of “banner blindness” is that the user who really wants to find the information the designer has highlighted is not likely to do so. In the experiments reported here, banner blindness is reproduced under controlled conditions. Banners located higher on the page and therefore further from the other page links were missed more often than banners located lower on the page and closer to the other links. Banners were missed more often when located on pages containing links to categories than when located on pages with links to specific items. Users saw banners hardly at all when clicking a banner was not required to accomplish a task.