26 · Remembering
Selective Attention
People focus on what serves their goal and tune out the rest.
Evidence: Holds upWhat we do with it
- 01
Anything that looks like an ad gets ignored, even when it isn't one. Designers call it banner blindness.
- 02
Put key information where people are already looking, right next to the task.
- 03
A change outside someone's focus can go unseen. When something important updates, say so plainly.
Examples
Getting it wrong, getting it right.
Don't
An important notice styled as a colorful banner across the top of the page. People skip it like an ad.
Do
The same notice as plain text next to the button it affects.
The evidence
What the research says.
Well established in the lab and on the web. Jan Benway and David Lane named banner blindness in 1998. In Benway's peer-reviewed version of the study, people hardly looked at banners unless the task required clicking one, and missed the banners placed highest on the page most often. In Moira Burke and colleagues' 2005 study, people rarely looked at the banner ads, yet the ads still slowed their searches, the flashing ones felt like extra work, and afterward people couldn't remember them. Magnus Pagendarm and Heike Schaumburg found in 2001 that people hunting for a fact recognized fewer banners afterward than people browsing freely.
Sources
- Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25(5).
- Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9).
- Benway, J. P., & Lane, D. M. (1998). Banner blindness: Web searchers often miss “obvious” links. Internetworking (ITG Newsletter), 1(3).
- Benway, J. P. (1998). Banner blindness: The irony of attention grabbing on the World Wide Web. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 42(5).
- Pagendarm, M., & Schaumburg, H. (2001). Why are users banner-blind? The impact of navigation style on the perception of web banners. Journal of Digital Information, 2(1).
- Burke, M., Hornof, A., Nilsen, E., & Gorman, N. (2005). High-cost banner blindness: Ads increase perceived workload, hinder visual search, and are forgotten. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 12(4).
Last reviewed November 7, 2026. How we keep this current