This is an interesting archived article from Jakob Nielsen ( the maven of web site friendly user optimization and best practices) on the evolution of your site visitors habits over the decade or so he has been studying what, when and how people interact with your content.

 

  I do believe that Nielsen was one of the first to release the various heat maps/eye tracking charts for what parts of the page were best for what purposes. Interestingly, as I’ve covered here a little bit more as of late, especially in the comments section ( even one just a few days ago) the MORE choices you offer people, the more likely it is that they’ll make NONE.  ( and simply leave)

The Squeeze Page is a Perfect Example of the Elegance of Offering ONE Action Alone….Once People Move Around On Your Site, They are Less Likely to Opt In

This is of course, tantamount to the old analogy of the movie theater with 10 fire exits – give people too many options, and in a moment of decisiveness, most of us will simply freeze ( and burn..:-) whereas if there is only ONE choice to make, a clear path to safety is eminently available.

 Of course that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a stampede for the door…..but as a site owner, if your door is the buy it now button, the affiliate banner or a contact link, that stampede is EXACTLY what you are hoping for. 

Anyway – Jakob is a very high minded thinker on these topics, and has a ton of research about banner blindness and user optimization that ISN’T colored with lots of guessing glasses, a real world smart dude who can teach us all a thing or two about clutter, and keeping the noise to a minimum if you’ve got an eye on making money with your site.  You can read the whole story at the link below.

Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings Summary: Users rarely look at display advertisements on websites. Of the four design elements that do attract a few ad fixations, one is unethical and reduces the value of advertising networks. I’ve been reluctant to discuss one of the findings from our eyetracking research because the conclusion is that unethical design pays off.In 1997, I chose to suppress a similar finding: users tend to click on banner ads that look like dialog boxes, complete with fake OK and Cancel buttons. Of course, instead of being an actual system message — such as "Your Internet Connection Is Not Optimized" — the banner is just a picture of a dialog box, and clicking its close box doesn’t dismiss it, but rather takes users to the advertiser’s site. Deceptive, unethical, and #3 among the most-hated advertising techniques. Still, fake dialog boxes got many more clicks than regular banners, which users had already started to ignore in 1997.

Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Tags: bannerblindness, web site optimization