Avoiding “Ad Blindness” - Digital Psychology #13

“Ad blindness” occurs when the brain decides content is irrelevant to the task at hand. This has been made especially worse by the many ads found on the internet today. Don’t fall into the trap of wasting space and creating a cluttered-feeling site by allowing the brain to do this with your supplemental information.

How Ad Blindness Works

There are few criteria that our brain users to blot out information that it deems irrelevant.

  • Color blocking. Colors that do not match the page style are less likely to attract fixations.
  • Spatial association. Items that are further spread out show a segmented subject area. This depends on the use, as white-space can also be used to attract attention.
  • Border segmentation. Similar to spatial associations, borders help to show that one thing has ended and another has begun. Again, this can also be used to attract attention.
  • Images. Text proves to be much more reliable in attracting fixations to assess the content. How applicable that information is is quickly assessed, but if it is applicable, using text is the easiest way to ensure your content is actually “seen.”

How to Prevent Ad Blindness

Simply put, avoid design patterns the web surfer’s brains have learned to mentally block. Here are some guidelines:

  • Use muted colors for backgrounds of content you want to attract attention to. White is actually the most likely to attract attention for most use cases.
  • Avoid strong borders, preferring a key-line instead. If you take advantage of a border inside the content area of your site to highlight key content, you can use this same style to highlight content outside of it. Be careful though, you don’t want to provide irrelevant information and turn the content area highlights into an area for the brain to ignore.
  • Use stronger colors for buttons or icons inside of a secondary content region. Against a muted background, they will actually draw the eye  more than a strong-colored box.
  • Don’t fill the area with an image. If you have a sidebox, ensure there is some margin around the image, and some supporting text. Facebook utilizes this to increase views on their ads in their desktop site.
  • Use clear headings and descriptive text as the primary content in boxes. Using text exclusively (when made appealing using the guidelines above) requires the eye to temporarily fixate on the content to determine it’s value.