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Subject:Re: Marketing block From:"Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher -at- EXPERSOFT -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 17 Aug 1999 13:29:05 -0700
At 03:09 PM 8/17/99 -0400, Christine Pellar-Kosbar wrote:
>Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon: on web pages, and now even on
signs,
>I find myself disregarding anything too flashy as an "ad." I don't even
read
>it. Sometimes it turns out to be important information.
>...Do others do this? Are we desensitizing people with flashy marketing
>materials? Or am I just getting old?
Oh, my eyes are extremely well trained!
On Web pages, I tend only to look at uniform shades of grey (text)
and straight horizontal and vertical lines (navigation bars).
I once worked on a software product where the original GUI "designer"
thought it wise to put a paragraph of explanation at the top of each
dialog box. My eyes don't expect a paragraph of text on a dialog box,
so I ignored the solid grey bar at the top. Took me about six months
to realize there was text to read there.
And if I don't force myself to slow down, I can read an entire programming
manual without ever seeing one word that's set in courier.
So it's not necessarily the flash -- you can't accuse C++ code set in
courier font of being flashy! -- it's the expectations. And I think those
expectations can work both for us and against us; but they are certainly
necessary to understand.
