Hi Bryan:
There is a lot of psychology applied to design. This particular suggestion
seems a bit far-fetched. Tigers are a lot bigger, noisier and smell worse
than banner.
I do think that people become habituated to ads and tend to ignore them. And
if the ad is using animation and you see it in your peripheral vision, you
may well have a reflexive shift in you're the focus of your attention. This
is called the "orienting response" and may be what the speaker was referring
to.
The orienting response is extremely powerful. If something in the
environment shifts you immediately pay attention to it. (That's the tiger
part). It is truly a survival mechanism.
When an orienting response occurs, the blood vessels supplying muscles
dilate so that you can run or fight if needed. When you plunge someone's
hand into cold water, blood vessels would constrict to conserve heat -- just
the opposite. Now it gets interesting...
If you do both an orienting response (e.g. ring a bell) and plunge someone's
hand into cold water at the same time, the blood vessels dilate. This is a
more powerful response than being shocked by cold.
Here are a few implications for design:
1. Do not design or place important controls or information where they might
be seen as ads. They are likely to be ignored by some users and not
processed. Information boxes that appear in a banner position at top or on
the side ("skyscraper ads") are the most vulnerable.
2. Beware of animations that might distract from where you want the user to
focus. Initially, an animation will attract attention until the user
habituates to it.
3. Conversely, if you want to attract the user's attention either because
it's an ad or a problem requiring the user's attention, change something in
the user's visual field though animation, color change and possibly sound.
This will cause an orienting response and refocus the user's attention.
Charlie
============================
Charles B. Kreitzberg, Ph.D.
CEO, Cognetics Corporation
www.cognetics.com
============================
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bryan J
Busch
Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 3:37 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Web interactions and the "old brain"
I was at a conference once, (either SxSW or Adaptive Path's UX Week), and
someone was speaking about banner ads, and how we only see them in our
peripheral vision, which makes us nervous because our "old brain" knows that
shadows moving in the corner might well be a tiger, and we should be on
alert.
Does any of this sound familiar? I'm very interested in how psychology plays
a role in web design, but so far I haven't found any resources on the topic.
Is there anything you can recommend?
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