[Sigia-l] Real World UI Design Failure

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

On 14 January 2011 10:36, Louise Hewitt <louise.hewitt at gmail.com> wrote:

> Purpose of the page = search results
> User goal = find out (based on my own criteria) which hotels are there I
> can stay in and try to pick one
>
> Purpose of pinned element = promote offer and encourage sign up (sorry, but
> the way it's designed this *is* it's primary function)
> User goal = Get this 'f*%&ing' thing out of my face so I can concentrate on
> the list
>
>
Sure. I was prepared for this to be a simple case of banner blindness, which
is what your logic is saying. But it seems to be more than that - hence my
post. This is because not a single participant even mention the pinned
header, even when they often made predictably derogatory comments about
advertising on other parts of the site. I would have thought at least one
person would remark on it, if only because it's still rather unusual on the
web and we had a few "net savvy" participants in some countries. Consider
also that the note-taker had been looking at (and in the UK, actually
facilitating) the sessions for about 36 hours before *he* even noticed it
was there.

So when I saw the research into the "silencing" effect, I couldn't help but
wonder if we were seeing that here. As a result, I'm a lot less enthusiastic
about using pinned headers now :-) My next project includes a pinned widget
bar (YouTube style, and for an entirely different purpose), so we'll see how
that goes.

Don't try to make one thing do both, or you fail at both.
>
>
A fair point, but putting ads in with top navigation is fairly standard
stuff on many sites, so I was hoping we'd get through that.

As an aside, I find it interesting that while UI design is usually fair game
for multivariate testing, media sales usually aren't. I'd love to A/B test
the pinned header with something other than a banner on that page so see if
it then got noticed, or had some other effect, but the business won't hear
of it. That said, we did an A/B test of Google Adsense turned on and off
(elsewhere on the site), and turned them off as a result, so it's not all
bad.

Jonathan