The Independent Film Channel's home page used to be one big "Dead Zone" before they redesigned it.

Ad placements are, by definition, dead zones.   These are specific, predictable sections of a website’s screen real-estate that are subconsciously tuned out by the user as unrelated to the page’s main content and functionality.  But designers unintentionally create dead zones of their own all the time.    A classic and well understood example of a dead zone is “right-rail” blindness.  Content and features below an ad – such as in the right-hand column of a typical two or three column layout – are tuned out as ads on the assumption that everything from an ad down is also an ad.   According to Nick Gould, CEO of the design and research firm Catalyst Group, the evidence of this phenomenon goes well beyond the anecdotal.   “There is no question that right-rail blindness is a phenomenon we’ve observed in both eye-tracking and usability testing.  This is of course mainly due to the ingrained expectation that ads live there.”   And it’s not just a matter of positioning elements in a layout.  The manner in which a page element itself  is designed can greatly amplify or lessen the dead zone effect, in the worse case scenario unintentionally deactivating important content areas and features from the user’s attention.   Often this comes from trying so hard to make an element “pop” visually, that the reverse effect occurs.   “The dead zone effect is obviously exacerbated if elements below ads are ad-like in their design,” Gould says.  ”Furthermore, promotional elements that have standard ad dimensions and contain images are frequently mistaken for ads.” Read the rest of this entry »