I read an article by Jakob Nielsen on banner advertising that made me think about how advertising is being used on sites currently, and how it could be improved in the future.

The findings in his eyetracking research led to some age old, rather obvious findings. If site ads are made up of text, faces, or cleavage (a.k.a. anything sexy), people will look. But the greatest find was that when people are navigating through a site for content, they are on auto-ad-block. They don’t even see the banner ads or ads that are not built into the site to look like meaningful content. (Banner Blindness)

This leads me to, again, think about the need for useful and intelligent site advertising. I feel that no site page should ever have more than 3 ads on it. The ads need to follow the design of the page, not construct it. The problem I have is that there are a lot of sites that would fall apart, layout-wise, if the ads were removed. I understand a need to make money, but I strongly feel that if you have the viewers, advertisers will pay to get their ads in those viewers’ faces.

Read On…

I read a great article by Luke Wroblewski talking about Primary/Secondary form actions. He worked with the UK-based usability firm Etre to see which pattern of Submit/Cancel buttons work best for completion times and usability on web forms.

I agreed with the results of the study and the philosophy that while it may take a second or two longer for the user to decide between a primary and secondary button that look different, it helps eliminate incorrect actions from being taken. Changing the color of the buttons isn’t always enough because people will still take a moment to figure out which one is correct for their action, but if you make them physically look different, it helps distinguish which action is more than likely the one you want to do. This can help ease the user along.

Link to the article: Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms

I came across a couple links today that made me really think about the state of the internet’s UI. One word came to mind…BAD.

Now my problem isn’t that not everyone has an amazing UI, in fact most are mediocre to bad, but at least they try and not everyone can afford graphic designers (or the skills).
My problem though is with letting users and your site go haywire. Case in point below:

• Clean Up Facebook Greasemonkey Script
• Clean Up MySpace Greasemonkey Script

If these scripts have to be created for your site, you’re doing something wrong! I’m all about user customization, but my problem lies in the fact that people don’t know what they’re doing, and when I visit a MySpace.com or Facebook.com site and there are blinking, twirling, “unreadable by poor color decision” texts and pictures on the page that now scrolls horizontally and vertically, well…it just makes me sad.

My solution is that designers lay out the page with areas to put things, don’t include ads in objects that people will embed in those sites, keep color customization to themes, and only allow so much crap…sorry, “extras” to be added to the page.

The internet in 2007 is about content. We’re done with 1997 and it wasn’t pretty. Think about how much content people are able to look and grab at. Speed readers and internet readers share a skill not many take into account, the ability to scan pages. We should be making the internet more accomodating. Do I like to sit in front of a webpage figuring out where the content is? No. Show me where it is, visually. Let me know what I’m looking at so that I can already read and be done and off to another site before I realize I just looked where you intended to land me.

Please, help me spread the word…save the UI of the internet. The tubes are clogging as we speak, er…read.