Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings (Jakob Nielsen's Ale. Summary: Users have learned to ignore content that resembles ads, is close to ads, or appears in locations traditionally dedicated to ads. Banner blindness is a long-known web user behavior: it describes people’s tendency to ignore page elements that they perceive (correctly or incorrectly) to be ads. And, while webpage patterns and types of advertisements have evolved, banner blindness is still prevalent, our recent research shows. Banner blindness is an instance of selective attention: people direct their attention only to a subset of the stimuli in the environment — usually those related to their goals. This behavior is a consequence of our limited attention capacities. If we were to attend to the enormous inflow of sounds and patterns that surround us, we would be overwhelmed and behave inefficiently. On the web, UI elements and different pieces of content all fight for users’ attention.
Legitimate content elements that have certain ad-like characteristics are ignored, too. 1. 2. 3. Internetworking (3.3): Article-Conceptual User Interface. Paintings - Dalek / official artist site. Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface. This draft was released March 15, 2006. Please email comments to bret worrydream.com. You can also download the PDF. Information Software and the Graphical Interface by Bret Victor Abstract #The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into “Human-Computer Interaction.” #Information software design can be seen as the design of context-sensitive information graphics. #Although this paper presents a number of concrete design and engineering ideas, the larger intent is to introduce a “unified theory” of information software design, and provide inspiration and direction for progressive designers who suspect that the world of software isn’t as flat as they’ve been told.
Scope and terminology #“Software,” as used here, refers to user-facing personal desktop software, whether on a native or web platform. Of software and sorcery #A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer’s idea of a spirit. #This is a software crisis, and it isn’t news.