Visitors Learn to Ignore Parts of Your Pages
After a single glance at an area of a page that turns out to be uninteresting, users tend to avoid that area from then on. Nielsen Norman Group calls this “hot-potato” behavior. The avoidance holds on that page, on other pages of the same site, and sometimes on other sites (Nielsen Norman Group, 2018).
What the research observed
The finding comes from eye-tracking research on banner blindness, which has been documented in 1997, 2007, and 2018. People ignore anything that looks like an ad, whether because of its position, its styling, or its closeness to real ads. Hot-potato behavior helps explain why the effect lasts. Once a user decides a slot holds nothing useful, they stop spending attention on it.
This saves users from judging the same sidebar or banner on every page. It becomes a problem when a site owner later puts something important there.
What it means for a business website
Many sites have a slot that visitors have already written off: a rotating banner at the top of the homepage, a sidebar of links, or a promo strip above the header. If that space has held generic or low-value content for a while, returning visitors have probably learned to skip it.
Putting a new offer, a change in hours, or an urgent notice into that slot means putting it where your regular visitors have stopped looking. The content inherits the reputation of the space it sits in.
What to do
- List the areas on your site that hold rotating promos, sidebars, or banner strips, and treat them as low-attention zones.
- Put important announcements and offers into the main content flow, near the headline or within the body text.
- Do not fill a slot with filler just because the layout has room. Empty space costs less than teaching visitors to ignore an area.
- Check real click and scroll data before assuming any area is being seen.
Sources
- Pernice. Banner Blindness Revisited: Users Dodge Ads on Mobile and Desktop. Nielsen Norman Group, 2018.