When designing a website, there are key user behaviours that should be taken into account. But in order to take them into account, it helps to know them. Below are 10 of the more interesting and less well-known user behaviours that regularly occur in user testing:
People have banner blindness
People don’t notice banners. It’s been found in eye tracking studies their gaze literally avoids settling on any area that looks like an advert instead it seems people actively try to avoid looking at them. This effect is called banner blindness.
Banner blindness affects most people, and has a startling side effect. Useful areas of the site that are overly graphically designed (and end up looking like an advert) are ignored by users as though they were adverts.
A good way to avoid banner blindness is to ensure your site banners are mostly text, so that they look as much like useful site content as possible. If you wish push adverts as much as possible, use text adverts, like those to the right hand side of Google search results, or in the TFL website.
