Posted in english
Why do we sometimes ignore banners?
Why do we sometimes ignore banners? Our brain, as a result of previous experiences, works out cognitive models and disregards irrelevant elements when searching for information.
More…“Were it a case of agnosia, the patient would see now what he had always seen, that is, he would not have suffered any decrease in his visual acuity; the brain would have simply become unable to recognize a chair where there was one… it would have lost the ability to know it knew…”
We tend to believe the visual world is brought to us by the mere information reaching our eyes.
In his book “An Essay on Blindness”, José Saramago mentions the existence of that unusual visual condition which, despite being associated to the eyes, is in fact a neurological disorder.
We tend to believe the visual world is brought to us by the mere information reaching our eyes. However, any knowledge of the world around us implies assigning meaning, or in other words, everything presented to us must be interpreted. Such assignment of meaning requires converting insignificant elements into objects packed with cultural substance.
The fact that most of us, including design-related professionals, are oblivious in that respect is somewhat intriguing, basically because the world we live in is loaded with objects. We go through life identifying, classifying, utilizing and evaluating objects, creating meaning for everything around us.
In the universe of electronic graphic interfaces, a variation of visual agnosia has been detected and is currently under study. It is called banner blindness and is described as a tendency the users have to simply ignore some shapes, colors, patterns and everything else in relative proximity. In those instances, we detect an inability to recognize what is being seen.
We may say that in the situation above, we see what is real but we do not see its representation.
That happens because our brain, as a result of previous experiences, works out cognitive models and proceeds to disregard irrelevant elements when searching for information.
Nielsen, the “Pope of Usability”, gives us some tips on how to avoid banner blindness, such as using a maximum of three banners a page, among others. Several other authors follow this same reasoning.
But is that enough to cure such blindness?
I believe the answer to visual agnosia does not lie in the number of banners placed within sites and maybe neither in their form, as sustained by some authors.
There already are examples of how to bypass forms of agnosia (visual or even auditory) in other media, like television for instance, where ads are inserted between news pieces, thus relaying the worth load of the news to the advertising and making the viewer commit his attention to the commercial message.
I do not mean to deal here with the ethical aspects of such procedure, but yet to demonstrate how important it is to understand the communicative tools of the medium we work in, namely the internet, and all the potential of its language.
“The limits of language represent the limits of my world”. Ludwig Wittgenstein
