User Behavior & Psychology / Article 10. First Published in Nov. 2006, HCI Vistas Vol-II Author: Dr. Dinesh Katre

Soft-garbage

Try opening your yahoo or rediff e-mail account or even other kinds of web-portals. You find a lot of advertising banners around. The web advertisements encroach your privacy and look like unwanted guests. They will be animating at the top or on the right side of your browser. Quite clandestinely, some web ads start floating as pop ups in your desktop estate. Clicking it hard, you shut them off. You tiptoe your way through such soft-garbage that litters your desktop every moment.

The web ads like filthy flies
keep hovering over and around the browser.

Visual Irritant

The web ads are a bigger nuisance than spam e-mail. The spam e-mail can at least be filtered or deleted without reading it. But web ads are visual; you see them and read them even when you don’t want. The vivid colors and stimulating animations of web advertisements distract your attention. The looped animation irritates you as it keeps repeating. While you concentrate on the main content, through the corners of your vision, you sense the visual noise. Your brain activity increases as your eyes move over the bold captions. That stresses you unnecessarily.

The Desperate Market Sectors

As far as Indian scene is concerned the web advertisements mainly belong to finance (loans, credits and deposits), insurance, employment, education, entertainment and tourism sectors. More specifically, there is great dominance of web advertisements for matrimonial, cheap air-travel, real estate, movies and electronic appliances. All these are highly competitive and desperate market sectors.

The companies are like hawks,
just waiting to pounce the customer.

Their web ads are waiting to trap you. The web advertisers resort to many unethical approaches (in my personal opinion) under the pretext of creativity. Let us learn about it.

Blockers

You log into your e-mail account and the access to In Box will be blocked by a web advertisement, with “Check Mail” link placed somewhere in the layout. Learning from this experience, the user is likely to ignore the advertisement and directly click on “Check Mail” link. Therefore, every time when you login, the advertisers cleverly change the location of “Check Mail” link in the layout, thus forcing you to see the advertisement.

Tricks and Traps

Furthermore, the user interface of web advertisements cheats you very often. There are many web advertisements that show a form with dropdown lists, text fields, options to check and a submit button. See figure 1. You feel like exploring that form, as it looks real. You click to explore it and bboom…..it opens the company website in a separate browser or in worst case the same browser.

Your UI mental model is cheated !

“UI mental model” is basically the user’s expectation of a particular behavior (which is developed through past experience) from the User Interface (UI). User interface shown in the web advertisement just misbehaves and contrary to your expectation!

Figure 1. Web ads with fake forms

Figure 2. Web ad with real form

Figure 3. Web ad with ‘click here’ button but entire clickable layout

You realize that it was only a screen shot of the form with a hyperlink to company URL. You feel tricked and trapped! But at the same time, some web advertisements provide a genuine form that can be actually filled and submitted online. See figure 2. So you have to keep taking chances and make your life miserable!

Also there are many pop-up ads that display a button called “Click Here”. See figure 3. When you drag the mouse pointer meticulously over the button to click, you realize that the entire image area of the advertisement is clickable. So the mouse movement towards the button area was waste of effort. Again your “UI mental model” is fooled.

Questions that must be answered

Such type of advertising is quite likely to de-sell and anti-market a product or earn bad name for it. The companies need to revisit their core values and see whether they wish to continue this way. The interactive advertisers need to answer following questions.

1. Feeling cheated or trapped like this, will the customer want to have business with you?
2. What should be the ethical norms for web advertising?
3. Does web advertising create a positive brand image for the company or the product?
4. What is the effectiveness of web advertising?
5. Can we have decent web advertisements that do not cheat the web users and still generate business?

Web Ads versus TV Ads

The biggest differentiating factor between Web ads and TV ads is-

The Web Ads are interactive and capable of instantly
engaging the customer in business transaction
unlike the TV Ads which are passive and good for brand building.

Therefore shouldn’t the interactive advertisers be more sincere and serious about their client’s business? In my opinion, the advertisers are yet to develop proficiency in interactive advertising. The point is- can you trap customers without letting them feel so?

Dr. Dinesh Katre presently heads the National Multimedia Resource Centre of C-DAC, Pune, India. He is the principle designer of many software products that deal with digital library, cultural informatics, e-learning, multimedia authoring and computer game design. He has special interest in the cognitive study of technology users and behavioral design of products. Journal of HCI Vistas is his community building initiative. It is meant to promote research oriented, multi-disciplinary thinking in the field of Human-Computer Interaction in India. This e-publication is open for usability practitioners and UX designers to publish short articles.

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