UI Design Newsletter – June, 2007

How often do you have the I-need-space-on-the-home-page debate? We all know the script: The business goal of the site is to convert clients / gather data. We need ads right up front where site visitors will see them. Marketing needs (big) space on the home page.

User Experience (UX) specialists understand that the objective of Web sites is to engage, persuade and convert clients. But we also understand that plunking ads on the home page is not the best way to do that. Mere exposure may get you to marry the girl next door, but it is unlikely to get you to click a tire store link on a consumer medical information page.

Wiggly, distracting, or poorly placed ads irritate users. Worse, they teach site visitors to ignore whole sections of layout.

Yet some online ads work. They capture visitors visually, and present an engaging hook. They get visitors to click. Even, at times, from the home page.

So what's the difference?

If an ad flashes in the banner and nobody clicks it, does it make a sound?

UX specialists intuitively know that several things influence the pull of online ads

• visual impact
• emotional appeal
• current need

Current user need is complex. It is more likely that you will click an ad that fulfills a need you are focused on now. In fact, if you need tires, you may click on that tire ad on the medical information page. But the chances are greater that you will engage more deeply with information that moves you forward within the task space at hand.

That's deductive. The good news is that there is also evidence: Wang and Day (2007) measured the effectiveness of Web banner ads and button ads by looking at how much viewers pay attention to the ad opportunities as the users progressed through the task space on the site. Not surprisingly, site visitors pay more attention to ads at some points than others.

But how does this help us argue where the ads should go?

The bad and the ugly could become good

Wang and Day (2007) observed that:

• Users are more sensitive to ads that are relevant to what they are already thinking about/looking at.
  
  
• Text-based ads that appeal to users' logic are more likely to drive attitude change when they appear toward the beginning or end of the meaningful task path.
  
  
• In the middle of the task path, emotional appeals engage more interaction (e.g., images of cancer survivors on a cancer research site can heighten emotional connections for potential donors).

This makes sense. In a well-designed task space, attention to the task-at-hand should build as the user moves further into a flow experience. Pulling them out of the middle of the task path should be harder. Hence the need for more emotional ads.

Diverting attention as they ramp up or wind down should be easier. Attention isn't fully focused yet. Presenting ads that rationally extend or backfill the content at hand should be attractive. Viewers are engaged in deep thinking about the task itself. They are primed to explore conceptually. Logically presented ad content that fits, fits in with less effort.

Understanding the persuasive flow, or how we can learn to love online advertising.

Wang and Day provide an important reminder that successful online advertising is more complex than dropping ads on the home page. Creating visually engaging and clever ads can grab attention. But, taking the next step, understanding what site visitors are focusing on, and how focused they need to be, and then placing the ads at key junctures can both influence the impact of online ads and reduce the negative response to the ads themselves.

References

Wang, J.C. and Day, R.F. (2007). The Effects of Attention Inertia on Advertisements on the WWW. Computers in Human Behavior, 23 (3), 1390-1407.

I thought the "seducible moment" for placing appeals was a key idea (offering a printer to someone AFTER they have elected to buy a computer rather then tossing printer ads on the home page). But here is a paper that gives us more depth. Text at the beginning or at the end. Emotional images during the task. But I wonder if this is anything like a complete story. I don't think so. It might be different if the appeal is for a major decision or a minor one, an already accepted idea or a big shift in mental model, an analytic decision or a blink response. In this area the thing I am most sure of is that we don't know enough. We have a growing set of guidelines and experience. But we had best apply these models to A/B testing so we know what the real result will be.