Jakob Nielsen is very much a person to listen to when it comes to website usability and interface design. He is very opinionated and outspoken but the funny thing is that he is right most of the time... He publishes an excellent website UseIt and every few weeks comes out with an Alert Box - the one for December 6th deals with web-based advertising and what people hate:
bq. The Most Hated Advertising Techniques
Advertising is an integral part of the Web user experience: people repeatedly encounter ads as they surf the Web, whether they're visiting the biggest portals, established newspapers, or tiny personal sites. Most online advertising studies have focused on how successful ads are at driving traffic to the advertiser, using simple metrics such as clickthrough rates.
bq. Unfortunately, most studies sorely neglect the user experience of online ads. As a result, sites that accept ads know little about how the ads affect their users and the degree to which problematic advertising tricks can undermine a site's credibility. Likewise, advertisers don't know if their reputations are degraded among the vast majority of users who don't click their ads, but might well be annoyed by them.
bq. Now, however, we have data to start addressing these questions. At my recent User Experience 2004 conference, John Boyd from Yahoo! and Christian Rohrer from eBay presented a large body of research on how users perceive online advertising. Here, I offer a few highlights from their presentation (my comments on their findings are solely my responsibility).
Here is the list of what people hate:
| Design Element | Users Answering "Very Negatively" or "Negatively" |
|---|---|
| Pops-up in front of your window | 95% |
| Loads slowly | 94% |
| Tries to trick you into clicking on it | 94% |
| Does not have a "Close" button | 93% |
| Covers what you are trying to see | 93% |
| Doesn't say what it is for | 92% |
| Moves content around | 92% |
| Occupies most of the page | 90% |
| Blinks on and off | 87% |
| Floats across the screen | 79% |
| Automatically plays sound | 79% |
