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Banner blindness 0:30
A 30-second explainer of Banner blindness, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.
Try the interactive Banner blindness demo
What this video covers
Banner blindness is the tendency to overlook elements that look like ads. After years of ignoring flashy, boxed, brightly coloured promotional content, people have trained themselves to filter those areas out automatically - so much so that they’ll miss useful information if it’s styled like an ad.
Styled like an ad - boxed, bright, off to the side - the message got skipped, even though it was exactly what you needed. Restyled as plain content in the flow, you found it at once. That's banner blindness: people filter out ad-shaped regions on sight. The lesson is uncomfortable for anyone who likes a "designed" callout - the more your important notice looks like marketing, the less it gets read.
