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Posted by
Greg Edwards
on
March 19 2005
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Wasting Money on Content in Visual Dead Zones
E*Trade's homepage from January 2001
Visual dead zones reduced E*Trade's ability to communicate with their target customers, because low percentages of people read their promotional content.
This is an old story*, but one of my favorites because it illustrates an important point, yet was really fun:
We eyetracked E*Trade's homepage and then inserted gibberish into it to illustrate that content in a "visual dead zone" doesn't get read and might as well not exist.
To identify parts of E*Trade's homepage that weren't being viewed, we collected eyetrack data on just 4 people (not too many people, eh?) as they surfed E*Trade's website to decide for themselves whether they wanted to sign up for E*Trade's services. We found that about 1/5 of the screen real estate above the fold was being wasted, so once we located un-viewed areas, we came up with gibberish to replace the existing text on a cached version of their homepage (this was a lot of fun!).
Examples of the gibberish tested on E*Trade's homepage:
- FDIC distrusts us * No Bank Quality * Will Lose Value
- Not ready to event an insurance? Tax group of our manager discussion free of funds.
- Get $25 to close an E*Trade Bank Money Market Plus Advice! Tax a gear cool and ATM access!
- ...and more
Then, we re-tested the modified homepage in the lab. As a secondary test, we also sent it out to a bunch of people who we didn't eyetrack. After people had seen the page while evaluating whether they were interested in signing up for E*Trade's services, we asked them if there was anything strange about the homepage. Only 1 in 25 people noticed!
The moral of the story is, if you wish to optimize your content: If content on your webpage is in a visual dead zone, it might as well not exist. People can't click on what they don't see. Money and time spent on content in a visual dead zone is wasted.
* This is an old E*Trade website -- we ran this test in January 2001. Since then, E*Trade has become a client, and is very proactive in working to improve the experience for their customers.
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Comments
Totally fascinating. Good work!
It's hard to tell from the tiny screenshot you've provided, but what is it about the design of this E*Trade page that makes that particular area a dead zone? Are there any lessons for designers to be had here?
John, that's a good question, since the area on the right (within the red square) was clearly designed to attract attention to promote their non-brokerage services, though it didn't. Interesting, I believe that "visual over-saturation" was the cause. There was so much color and attention-grabbing techniques going on that they canceled each other out and ended up just being cluttered.
Good points. Between the "$75 BONUS" image top-left and price graph top-right, it makes sense that the area just below that would be neglected. I've seen this in my usability testing of web sites -- people tend to skip the area beneath a visually prominent element.
By the way, I am totally fascinated by eye-tracking research, and have been since I started designing for the Badger Herald in Madison, WI years ago. It's great to see you sharing this information here, and it's enlightening to see how our assumptions as designers translate into reality when people view a page.
John: "I am totally fascinated by eye-tracking research"
Greg: me too!
Wow, I've been fascinated by eye-tracking research since I read that report last year on where eyes travel on pages. This study is like a study I read a few years back where a bank did some testing by sending out a brochure that included a free money giveaway to anyone who called, but no one saw it.
Greg, my question is, where did eyes go to next?
I am not surprised there is a dead zone. That page is not easy to look at. Viewers are probably desperate to click through to anywhere rather than have to stare at such an oversaturated page.
Col, the interesting thing about this page was the extent to which it had been usability tested, but still had this major "value-proposition communication" problem. We test (and help optimize) a lot of pages that companies believe internally are good and that have already been through multiple rounds of usability testing.