As Wikipedia describes it – “Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors on a website ignore banner-like information.” As Jakob Nielsen mentions, “Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad.”

The term “banner blindness” was coined by Benway and Lane (1998). It was a result of website usability tests where major test participants, consciously or unconsciously, ignored information that was presented in banner or looked like a banner.

This eye-tracking study by Jakob Nielsen has confirmed that most of the time, the banner blindness is real. Users are now ‘immune’ to these ethical and now-ethical ways of advertising on the web and tend to ignore those ads or something that looks like an advertisement and rather keep looking relevant information in the form of links, etc, while ignoring large animated or colorful elements like graphics.

Also, users generally read the whole content; rather they do scan the content. If the content is interesting for the user, then he might choose to read it in-depth. But, in all such cases, he still may prefer not to see those noticeable banners.

Source: Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings
(Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, August 20, 2007)

Heatmaps from eyetracking studies:
The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations. Green boxes were drawn on top of the images after the study to highlight the advertisements.
© 2007 by Jakob Nielsen.

References / Resources:

Benway, J. P., Lane, D. M.,
Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss ‘Obvious’ Links
1998, Internet Technical Group, Rice University

Norman, D. A., Commentary:
Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design
1999, Internet Technical Group

Pagendarm, M., Schaumburg, H.,
Why Are Users Banner-Blind? The Impact of Navigation Style on the Perception of Web Banners,
2001, Journal of Digital Information

Why Are Users Banner-Blind?
Journal of Digital Information (July 31, 2001)

Just How ‘Blind’ Are We to Advertising Banners on the Web?
Usability News (Summer 2000)

Please submit resources / insights for Banner Blindness here, if you have any.

Heat maps provide you an insight for “sensitive areas” on your website which you can use to provide better placement to core content or promote product or information you are willing to highlight on your website to increase online sales, etc.

Heat maps are used to understand the user’s behavior on a web page for which the heat maps have been generated.

The core idea of using a heat map is to analyze/test how a user is interacting with a web site. What links are they clicking on? What kind of page design may work well? What functionality placed at different zones can work better? We can get help from such heat maps to understand some missing factors in our application.

For example, if a button is not getting any or less clicks even though it’s a button, then there is a serious issue of “affordance“, which tells us that the design of the button is not intuitively implying its functionality and use.

The screen shot given below is a heat map overlay for this ‘Usability Factors’ blog homepage (April 2009). The “warmer” areas depict more clicks.

Heat Maps generated for Usability Factors blog homepage

According to Jesper Rønn-Jensen, there is a difference in the results collected by mouse-tracking because it’s skewed by the mouse (or “pointing device” to put it in academic terms). You can read more about at: http://justaddwater.dk/2006/12/21/usability-heatmaps-eyetracking-vs-mousetracking/

For Eye-tracking and heat map tools, please see:
http://crazyegg.com
http://www.punkyduck.com/usability-accessibility/usability-reporting.aspx

For more information on Eye-Tracking, please see:
http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/
Download White Paper (PDF)
http://www.webusability.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/eye-tracking-white-paper1.pdf

Please provide your insights on this! Thanks.