Usability tip: the other side of ad blindness

If you are a regular user of Google or Yahoo, you’ve probably learned to ignore the sponsored links placed at the top of your search results. This is called banner, or ad blindness. This obviously affects those who stand to make money off these ads, but it also affects the usability of the website in question — as demonstrated by my experience on the IRS website.

A few days ago, I was helping Chan research some old tax publications. Specifically, I wanted to find publication 501 from 2003. Now, any savvy web surfer would know the best way to go about this is to use the search form, right? (Let’s forget the fact that search functions in most government websites are virtually unusable)

And so I typed in “2003 publication 501,” hit enter and… didn’t find anything. I tried 2004, and didn’t find anything either. But the 2005 publication was there. I tried 2003 again, and did not see anything relevant. I was about to give up and use Google (I should have tried that in the first place) when I noticed the search result I wanted was staring right at me, at the very top of the search results:

It was there, 2003 Forms, Instructions, and Publications, except it looked like a web ad, and I completely ignored it! It’s probably not so much that it looked kind of like a web ad, but more because it was styled differently than the regular search results — thus preconditioning me to assume that it was a sponsored link.

Usability lesson: If you have ads on your site, make sure ads and regular content are distinguishable. Moreover, don’t style your content like an ad, and sometimes making it look different from the rest of your content is enough to make it look like one.