The fact that the searchers missed the supposedly salient information has nothing to do with big, colorful and salience: it has to do with schemas, frameworks, and expectations. I suspect the banner was indeed noticed: I suspect that people carefully scrolled past it to get it out of the way so they could search the less bold, less colorful, less salient places. Why this behavior? Why does something so big and central escape notice? Well, there is seeing and then there is seeing. Lo and behold, Benway and Lane showed, it was the rare individual who noticed that this bold and salient banner contained the information being sought. Suppose a designer wants to make sure that people browsing a site can find "important-information." The designer carefully makes the link to "important-information" big, bold, colorful.
And the "they" refers to "we": us.īenway and Lane showed that if something is too obvious, too big, too powerful, it is overlooked (a point well known to Sherlock Holmes, by the way – or perhaps more precisely, known to Conan Doyle). They are driven by curiosity, boredom, emotion. People follow their interests, their needs, their customs. People behave the way they behave, not the way our logical analyses and wishes would have them behave. This paper, shows once again the importance of observations over logic when it comes to predicting human behavior. This is pretty interesting stuff, for the entire reason they are so big and obnoxious is to attract attention, yet they fail.Įvidently nobody ever studied real users before – they simply assumed that big, colorful items were visible. 1998: 1.3) – the fact that people tend to ignore those big, flashy, colorful banners at the top of web pages. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN INTERNETWORKING, MARCH 1999 1īenway and Lane have studied "Banner Blindness" (ITG Newsletter, Dec.
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