A few days ago, Jakob Nielsen posted a summary of some eye tracking studies, verifying or reiterating things we've known or suspected for years. In Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings, Nielsen reminds us that users don't see banners. In fact, his heatmaps below show that users don't even see content that looks like banners.
It turns out there are three things that attract readers' eyes more than anything else when they're reading a page:
- Plain Text
- Faces
- Cleavage
We probably could have guessed as much. There are two lessons here that we already know, but for which we can be thankful to Mr. Nielsen for reminding us.
First, content creators: make your content look like content and not like advertisements. Separate it visually AND spatially; readers are going to breeze right by it if they even suspect it's an ad.
Second, advertisers: make your ads look like cleavage, but you know this already.
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