[HN Gopher] Banner blindness
___________________________________________________________________
Banner blindness
Author : yamrzou
Score : 85 points
Date : 2024-03-29 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| reidjs wrote:
| That article will be very meta next time Jimmy Wales' face is
| plastered over the page asking for wikipedia donations.
| andai wrote:
| That might be why his face is there. Surely that counteracts
| banner blindness (at least partially)?
| karaterobot wrote:
| > A higher than expected number of advertisements may cause a
| user to view the page as cluttered.[7] The number of adverts and
| annoyances on a webpage contribute to this perception of
| clutter.[6] As users can concentrate on only one stimulus at a
| time, having too many objects in their field of vision causes
| them to lose focus.[8] This contributes to behaviors such as ad
| avoidance or banner blindness.
|
| I have done a pretty good job filtering out advertisements and
| other annoying web crap, and if anything ever sneaks through I
| notice it immediately. Whatever the opposite of banner blindness
| is, that's what I exhibit. Banner hypersensitivity?
| CoffeeTails wrote:
| Same here. Some pages are, for me, unusable without blocking
| all ads and banners. Especially if they move or have bright
| colors!
| dhosek wrote:
| Sometimes banner blindness becomes total blindness:
| https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kop4ci756...
| malfist wrote:
| I don't get how companies, who's only product is content, get
| their content to be so....distastefully full of ads.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The content is not the product just like how the chum a
| fisherman tosses is not the product. The product is the
| customer base and they make money selling access to it for
| advertising.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Exactly. That's the truth of modern Internet - including
| social media: content is not the product, it's _bait_.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'd argue that with so many KPIs based around
| "engagement", it's not just social media but software in
| general.
| ben_w wrote:
| This makes me feel worse about LLMs...
| jollyllama wrote:
| Yes, this is the chosen "solution" to banner blindness
| andai wrote:
| Hey, once you accept cookies, a full 50% of vertical height
| becomes available for reading.
| thih9 wrote:
| What do you use? Does this approach work both on desktop or
| mobile?
| YoshiRulz wrote:
| uBlock Origin has been available on Android Firefox for
| years.
| saghm wrote:
| I feel like a similar thing happens in "real life" sometimes, not
| just on websites. Back in high school, I used to volunteer at an
| animal shelter, and we had an area out back where we'd walk the
| dogs or let them run around in one of a few fenced in areas
| throughout the day so they could go to the bathroom and get some
| exercise. The door leading out here was located in one of the
| rooms with dog kennels, so people coming to potentially adopt a
| dog would walk through this room a lot, and often they'd try to
| walk out back and watch or participate with the volunteers and
| staff taking some of the dogs out. We'd ask them politely to go
| back inside because they aren't allowed out there and point out
| the very large sign in large font on the door saying this, and
| every time they'd always act very surprised because they claimed
| not to have seen it. I'm sure some people were just feigning
| ignorance because it seemed easier, but the sheer number of
| people claiming it makes it believable that at least _some_ of
| them genuinely didn't notice; they saw a door, they wanted to go
| through, and they opened it without processing the words right in
| front of their face.
| bagels wrote:
| There are so many signs that everyone encounters everyday that
| are of no consequence. Everyone develops the habit of not
| reading them.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Adblock for the brain.
|
| This is the problem with advertisements. The vie so hard for
| your attention they really are hard to ignore. But after they
| catch your attention you've realized that your attention has
| just been wasted. Soon you catch yourself just filtering out
| anything that could potentially be an ad.
| breischl wrote:
| Definitely a thing. Just yesterday I was annoyed by my auto
| mechanic's credit card fee, and said they should've told me up
| front.
|
| She pointed out it was on a sign on the counter that I was
| looking at that moment, and had also been there when I dropped
| the car off the day before.
| Sharlin wrote:
| All of us act, much of the time, on varying degrees of
| autopilot. It's unlikely that the automatic parts of the brain
| can read, although presumably they are quite capable of
| pattern-recognizing and processing learned symbolic language
| like traffic signs (and even that's by no means guaranteed - so
| many humans merrily ignore or miss changes in signage in
| traffic, having traveled the same route a thousand times
| before).
|
| The strength and type of stimulus required to "wake us up" -
| for the brain to realize there's something novel or unexpected
| that requires the activation of higher-level, analytic parts of
| the brain - probably varies a lot from person to person, but
| just a bunch of text is not always enough to do that unless
| accompanied by familiar semiotic language, which is of course
| the reason we use symbols and colors to make important messages
| more likely to be perceived and understood. The best wake-up
| signals are, of course, those that physically prevent you from
| doing something you intended to do - a locked door, for
| example.
| petsfed wrote:
| There are situations where its hard to understand _how_ even
| the non-verbal warnings didn 't latch though.
|
| There's "no unauthorized personnel", and then there's "Fire
| door, alarm will sound".
|
| In college, i worked at a university recreation center, and the
| desk I worked at was about 15 feet from a fire door. It sat
| somewhat between the weight room and the men's locker room, so
| virtually all male customers walked past this specific, well
| marked, fire door during their visit. And about 2-3 times a
| week, while I was working, somebody would finish up their
| workout and just push that door open and walk out. And every
| time, they'd look thunderstruck that the alarm did in fact
| sound.
|
| I eventually dropped all pretense of understanding that they
| were on autopilot, and began commenting as I deactivated and
| reactivated the alarm AGAIN "I thought universities required
| students be able to read". Only one person ever got short with
| me over that, and all I had to do was point at the letters that
| were bigger than their head, directly at eye level, 18 inches
| from their face, while they pushed the door open.
| QuantumYeti wrote:
| Sounds like you were upset that you had a job looking at a
| door, and took it out on people.
| ethanbond wrote:
| It's totally reasonable to scold people for using emergency
| exits (especially alarmed ones) without an emergency need.
|
| It _also_ doesn't make you a bad person or stupid to
| subconsciously miss signage. But you should be okay with a
| bit of scolding in that case.
| QuantumYeti wrote:
| It's not reasonable to scold strangers, especially if
| you're just some random employee.
| vermilingua wrote:
| Yes, it absolutely is reasonable to scold strangers for
| things like this, _especially_ if you're an employee who
| sees it happening regularly.
| permo-w wrote:
| scolding is broadly something you do to someone you see
| as beneath you. if you feel the need to scold strangers,
| you've probably got other issues
| petsfed wrote:
| So if one of your peers pulls a fire alarm or blasts an
| air horn in your work place, while you're on a call or
| engaged in some other highly focused task, the
| appropriate response is to just shrug and think "I need
| to be such a highly emotionally controlled person that I
| can only passively deactivate the alarm, contact an
| authority who won't even be here before the culprit
| leaves and just move on with my day"?
|
| Fine, I didn't "scold" this person, I called out a peer
| for their shitty, antisocial behavior. Or is holding
| someone accountable even in words for the painful
| consequences of their decisions unacceptable too?
| kelnos wrote:
| I think you have a definition for "scolding" outside the
| mainstream.
|
| You scold someone who has done something wrong and should
| know better. There need not be any judgment about the
| person's worth attached.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| If you're an employee, and a member of the public is in
| your workplace, then you have a reasonable expectation
| that they will behave according to the rules of that
| workplace. Often these rules are for safety, and for sure
| it is absolutely reasonable to scold strangers if they
| have zero situational awareness.
|
| I work in a medical practice. We have an expectation that
| people will obey rules for their and our protection. For
| example: we had a sign that, at our reception desk, that
| people should stay behind a line and not approach too
| close.
|
| There was a thick, clearly visible tape line on the
| floor.
|
| There was a two large signs on reception desk asking
| patients to stay behind the line.
|
| This is during the heightened awareness of the pandemic.
| People were asked to change their behavior in many ways.
|
| Patients would just come up to the reception desk and
| lean _over_ the desk.
|
| Damn right I "scolded" them for it. I mean, I didn't
| roast them, but I used a tone of voice, and asked them to
| step away from the desk, and pointed out the signs. Some
| of them were cranky about doing so ... when SARS was
| rampant!
| ethanbond wrote:
| "Just some random employee" as in... the person tasked
| with maintaining security and safety of the facility?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Is there even a reason for an emergency exit to not be
| treated as a regular, auxiliary exit? I.e. not labeled as
| regular, but also not an issue if people use it.
| kelnos wrote:
| The reason is often the opposite: you don't want people
| coming _in_ that door (maybe it 's a limited-access
| building and you don't want to staff security/ID checker
| at more locations). Sure, you can lock it from the
| outside, but if people are regularly leaving from that
| door, randos outside are going to sneak in before the
| door shuts.
| petsfed wrote:
| If the facility has any need to control access, they need
| to be more aggressive than just one way doors, since
| fire-code compliant one-way doors are trivially defeated
| with a doorstop.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Is there even a reason for an emergency exit to not be
| treated as a regular, auxiliary exit?
|
| Absolutely, ex:
|
| 1. When that exit may be used _as an entrance_ to a
| prohibited or fee-only area. Someone inside opens the
| latch for people waiting outside, either intentionally or
| accidentally, allowing them to enter without being
| noticed.
|
| 2. To supplement other things which may trigger an alarm,
| or for situations (e.g. violence) that can't be detected
| by a simple detector. It also means you don't need to
| plant as many alarm-panels around the place which
| panicked people are unlikely to use on their way out
| anyway.
| petsfed wrote:
| I dunno how much time you've spent around fire alarms, but
| they're required to be painfully loud. Not "permanent
| damage" loud, but loud enough to trigger e.g. migraines in
| people who suffer from them. This door had a fire alarm on
| it.
|
| The university needed to control access to the facility
| through one secure checkpoint (that I had worked at in the
| past, but at this time no longer did so). They didn't want
| (for instance) random townies to be able to come and go via
| the side doors without filling out the relevant liability
| waivers, because it turns out screwing around in a weight
| room carries some risk. To say nothing of the consequences
| of some rando wandering in off the street and posting up in
| the locker room.
|
| I was answering phone calls, helping people rent outdoor
| equipment. My job was not at all watching the door. But I
| had to deal with 19 year olds who (and I did watch this a
| couple times) would look directly at the sign, pause to
| read it, push the door open, then have an utterly shocked
| expression that the _PAINFULLY LOUD_ alarm was going off.
| And I 'd have to drop whatever I was doing, go turn off the
| alarm, then recompose and return to the customer that I was
| helping.
|
| Please explain to me what is so objectionable about a
| school controlling access to its facilities.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > "Fire door, alarm will sound".
|
| IMO those doors shouldn't just have a sign-sticker slapped on
| them, there ought to be something visually (and tactilely)
| different about the push-bar itself.
|
| P S.: For example, a _wavy_ bar, or a bunch of distinctly
| raised bumps on the surface in strong contrasting color like
| high-vis yellow with reflectivity.
|
| Since this is for an indoor surface _nobody should be
| touching_ , that means durability isn't a big issue: Just
| stick some adhesive blister-chunks onto whichever push-bar
| happens to need the warning, and then scrape them off if the
| situation changes.
| petsfed wrote:
| The whole reason that I had keys to enable/disable the
| alarm was specifically because the Outdoor Program that I
| worked at needed to load in/out large equipment (think
| canoes, bikes, sleds, etc) that was ungainly to move
| through the locker room. This was also the primary avenue
| for moving e.g. weight room equipment in and out of the
| facility. So while it didn't get used a lot for non-
| emergency use, it got used often enough that non-durable
| controls would degrade much too quickly.
| codazoda wrote:
| Many of these, however, should just be doors. For many of
| them the alarming of them seems unnecessary.
| permo-w wrote:
| >I eventually dropped all pretense of understanding that they
| were on autopilot, and began commenting as I deactivated and
| reactivated the alarm AGAIN "I thought universities required
| students be able to read".
|
| this is an odd sentiment. so what, you were originally
| _pretending_ to give them the benefit of the doubt, but then
| you just gave up? so your original thought was that they were
| doing it on purpose for some reason? why on earth would they
| do that?
| petsfed wrote:
| I started out giving people (the perps were uniformly male)
| the benefit of the doubt, but my patience wore thin with
| how frequently it happened, and finally I started
| explicitly calling people out.
|
| I suppose, I should've phrased it as
|
| "I eventually dropped _even the_ pretense of
| understanding... "
|
| >why on earth would they do that?
|
| Why on earth would a 19 year old male, who has never been
| away from home before, has likely never seen any real
| consequences for their behavior before, read a sign that
| warns them of said consequences, and still decide that
| those consequences are less bad than walking an extra 100
| feet through a locker room?
|
| I assume the same reason that similarly aged college males
| removed all of the fluorescent light tubes from the
| hallways of their own dorm. Or the same reason at least one
| of the shower drains in the dorm's men's communal bathroom
| was plugged with paper towels every month.
| nkrisc wrote:
| If it looks like a regular door, people will open it. If it
| is not a regular door, it should not look like one.
| josefresco wrote:
| > feigning ignorance
|
| We have our hourly rate printed on a sign in our conference
| room. The walls are very clean, with almost no other signage.
| Despite communicating my rate to a client (via email) and
| having two meetings in this room, this particular client was
| shocked when they received my final bill which (again) stated
| our rate. I believe in this case they were just unhappy and
| looking for an "emotional plea" way out of payment.
| ben_w wrote:
| I once visited a sword shop, and only noticed the signs tiled
| every metre horizontally and vertically across the walls saying
| "do not touch" when the person I was with told me about them as
| my fingers hovered mere centimetres from one of the wall-
| mounted blades.
|
| I also didn't notice the moonwalking gorilla in the famous
| video clip despite being aware in advance that there would be
| one.
| neon5077 wrote:
| In the early days of the pandemic, the retail chain I worked
| for had a curbside delivery only policy. No customers in the
| store period, you had to call us and we'd bring your whatever
| out to you.
|
| No amount of signage on the door would stop people walking in.
| I stacked a bunch of boxes physically blocking the door and
| people still forced their way in.
|
| The _only_ thing that worked was putting a strip of blue
| painter 's tape across the doorway directly at eye level.
|
| I have long since stopped trying to make sense of other
| people's behavior.
| bagels wrote:
| A bunch of stacked boxes are really ambiguous. Did someone
| stack them there on accident, or as a prank?
| D-Coder wrote:
| NotAlwaysRight.com has tons of stories about people who ignored
| signs, closed doors, _locked_ doors etc.
| paganel wrote:
| I'm exactly like that, this is why I can browse the web with no
| ad-blocker installed with almost no issue, by default I just
| ignore all banners.
|
| Curiously enough the same thing does not happen when watching
| regular TV programs. I've stopped watching regular TV almost 4
| years ago, and that's why when I happen to visit some of my
| friends who have the TV on I'm always surprised whenever ads
| interrupt whatever is being shown, I can't understand how come
| people can put up with that. I guess they formed "TV ad
| blindness"
| andai wrote:
| I think the difference is that you can't ignore an ad when it
| comes on, because the thing you were watching goes away.
| Whereas even on the worst websites you can just scroll or click
| the X and get back to what you were doing.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| My favorite example of this
| https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/120541/why-do-people-...
| ot wrote:
| Surprised that neither the article or this thread link to
| https://xkcd.com/570/
| kaycebasques wrote:
| This can be a GOTCHA in docs site UX. A lot of docs sites use
| admonitions (e.g. [1]) to call special attention to a particular
| piece of info and, ironically, the admonition might make readers
| less likely to see the info.
|
| [1] https://docusaurus.io/docs/markdown-features/admonitions
| hinkley wrote:
| I ran into this about 8 years ago. I was using a new dev tool,
| and the docs said there was a UI element to do something. I
| looked, and looked and just could find what they were talking
| about. So I contacted them to ask what the deal was, and they
| sent me a screen grab. Turns out what I was looking for was in
| a weird rectangle embedded halfway down the page and centered
| on the 3rd quartile of the width of the page.
|
| Exactly where someone would stick an ad into an HTML page. They
| had put a box around it and styled it a little differently, so
| my brain tuned it right out.
| quercusa wrote:
| Prop 65 has entered the chat...
| user- wrote:
| They should include a blurb about Wikipedia's donation requests
| gunshai wrote:
| I thought that's what the article was going to be about tbh.
| eastbound wrote:
| Wikipedia has had a banner for 20 of the last 20 years, claiming
| not to be able to pay hosting and management bills, while hosting
| and management represent about 1% of their global finances, while
| they have various endeavours like hiring paid rewriters to
| rewrite Wikipedia in various political ways.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I wish the image in the article was a screenshot of Wikipedia
| begging for donations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fundraising_banner.jpeg
| permo-w wrote:
| why wish? make it so
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| To be fair the existing image is a really good example
| omoikane wrote:
| > Users dislike animated ads
|
| This section cites a few sources from ~10 years ago, but we still
| see those annoying video ads pop up in random places in 2024. I
| wonder if those ads were actually bought by competing companies
| with the intent to bring negative attitudes toward whatever is
| being advertised.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-29 23:00 UTC)