The Influences of Design Esthetic, Site Relevancy and Task Relevancy on Attention to Banner Advertising

Two eye tracking studies were conducted to investigate the impact of information relevance and visual design treatments on inattention blindness to banner advertising on web pages. It is an important question to determine how ads should be designed to maximize their value. Participants completed information-seeking tasks while viewing pages that contained advertisements either related or unrelated to the page content and either related or unrelated to the user's task. Ads were either designed with rich visual elements or modified to contain minimal design. Page-relevant ads and user-task-relevant ads were expected to attract more attention than irrelevant ads, but richly designed ads more not expected to attract more attention than text-only ads. Results showed that participants spent more time attending to the task-relevant ads, but not to ads with visual design treatments or to the page-relevant ads. This finding has implications for web design, particularly where there is a risk of inattention blindness. Web sites that host ads can avoid displaying ads that detract from the user experience.