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Why do people not notice our enormous, prominent, clear and contrasting banner?
- throw1234651234 4y agoWhat banner? Could you post a link to a page with your banner?
- lucakiebel 4y agohttps://www.dandwiki.com/w/images/5/54/Homebrew_Banner.jpg https://www.dandwiki.com/w/images/5/54/Homebrew_Banner.jpg
- navbaker 4y agoThere's a big picture of it as soon as you hit the link to the Stack Exchange post.
- revolvingocelot 4y ago"Why do people not notice our enormous, prominent, clear and contrasting image in TFA?"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- worewood 4y agoCan't tell if sarcastic or really asking...
- ricardobayes 4y agoBanner blindness is real
- feet 4y agoWe only have the advertising industry to thank
- nevinera 4y agoWe've been trained to ignore enormous, prominent, clear and contrasting things by decades on the internet.
- sph 4y agoAnd it made me notice that StackOverflow has a banner on top. I literally have never known there was a search bar up there. I think more than ignoring banners, we've become really good at just focusing at the content div. A bit like the Reader Mode in your browser.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fundad 4y agoBecause it’s a banner
- spicyusername 4y agoWe've all been trained to ignore ads and that banner is prominently where an ad would be. I like the suggestions that recommend slightly modifying the rest of the pages theme and adding text to the page title.
- titzer 4y agoBy this point in humanity's development, their brains had developed the ability to automatically block the parts of reality screaming for their attention, results of an economic system based on coercive consumption. Attention grabbers bifurcated into subtle, nefarious actors intent on slipping past in-brain ad-blocking and the shouters, turning up the volume and animations to make ads impossible to not see. People were subtly crippled, partially blind, now. Yet it was, after all, the mind's defense mechanism against an increasingly hostile environment trying to rob it of its most precise resource: attention. That was, of course, until they banned psychic violence in the "Goddamn, get out of my brain" amendment in the late 21st century.
- tinalumfoil 4y agoYou could say almost the same thing walking through an ancient Bazaar as sellers yell advertisements at you for their wares.
- manimino 4y agoEspecially if the Bazaar sellers followed you throughout the day through your work and leisure time.
- TremendousJudge 4y agoAnd took notes on your personal life and tried to sell you things they'd specifically think you'd want. And traded notes with other sellers.
- Double_a_92 4y agoIt's not uncommon in smaller rural villages to have sellers slowly drive through the streets and yell that they are selling things.
- jjoonathan 4y agoRight, but it probably sucked. We heavily romanticize it today, but we romanticize all sorts of things that were actually not so great.
- kwhitefoot 4y agoPut the information you want people to read in the body of the information that they are already reading. No one looks all that gubbins that surrounds the meat of a web page any more than people look at or care about street furniture. And, anyway what is the real distinction between official and homebrew? Is that like Organic and Homemade in a supermarket? A distinction that is often without a meaningful difference.
- bencollier49 4y agoCanon vs. custom, I think. The point being that you don't want a random person complaining to their DM that they're not using the rule about magical trousers, when it was actually written by some random on the internet and added to a Wiki.
- gigaflop 4y agoHomebrew content in D&D can be ridiculously poorly-balanced compared to officially-published content, which is required to go through at least some internal testing by the game's managers and designers.
- baud147258 4y ago> And, anyway what is the real distinction between official and homebrew? Well, official is the material written by the creator of the game (here WotC), which is supposed to be tested, properly edited and more or less balanced; homebrew is written by anyone: that doesn't mean it's lower quality or unbalanced, but there's less of a guarantee; so most GM will usually allow official content and forbid homebrew
- sudden_dystopia 4y agoIt looks like a title header or something, I probably wouldn’t read it either. Too high up and to the right. Needs to be centered and closer to the reading material.
- Oarch 4y agoIt looks too much like a visual design element. We've become trained to see and not see certain visual patterns. An example of a notification style that's more likely to be noticed: https://carbondesignsystem.com/components/notification/usage/ https://carbondesignsystem.com/components/notification/usage...
- dgorges 4y agoThe original post and the accepted answer is from August 2018. Banners are still the same, they didn't change anything.
- Blackthorn 4y agoI used to be a part of that site before splitting off to create another dungeons and dragons wiki. The owner of it doesn't want to change anything, hence why we split off.
- SomeHacker44 4y agoNeeds (2018) in the title.
- mkoryak 4y agoSo they never fixed it after all that? I went to the site linked in the post, and that banner is still like that o_0 https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page
- pclmulqdq 4y agoI have enjoyed D&D wiki before, and I admit that I have also missed the huge banner. Usually, I will read a page, get halfway down to the place where the rules get crazy, and then scroll up to the top to check if it's a homebrew. The banner is completely invisible!
- FranticFervor 4y agoItalics is a poor choice for the text, feels like it takes more mental energy to read so it's easier to gloss over. The color scheme doesn't seem to match the rest of the website, so it's easier to write off as an ad or to just ignore it out of disgust. The main text on the left, "Homebrew Page", doesn't necessarily register as synonymous with "Unofficial" to me, so even if someone gives it a passing glance they might just assume it's a specific version of D&D and therefore official. I'm not deep in the community though, so most players may already understand what it means.
- vermilingua 4y agoYeah “homebrew” is a pretty well-known term within the community to mean non-official. Interestingly, DandDWiki is somewhat notorious for being less than accurate in many articles, I wonder how much of that reputation is potentially attributable to this phenomenon of mixing up homebrew and official content.
- projektfu 4y agoI deal with something similar in a bit of software I use. If I click on an appointment, I can then click on the patient name to see the patient record or the client name to see the client info. At some point someone thought they should make the patient name more prominent, so they put it in a larger font, bold, all caps with extra spacing between the characters, and now I never see it and end up accidentally clicking the client's name.
- thejosh 4y agoI thought this was a joke about the large banner at the top of the SO page. https://i.imgur.com/nIrgPJi.png https://i.imgur.com/nIrgPJi.png
- FranticFervor 4y agoWas also confused by that for a moment. It's so large to the point I was vaguely annoyed by how much screen space it used.
- someweirdperson 4y agoWhy did my add-blocker not remove that... scroll 2 clicks...
- drexlspivey 4y agobecause it's a static image served by the same domain, like the old web ads
- dash2 4y ago"If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there." - the incomparable Douglas Adams
- worewood 4y agoShould have done a clear banner, with maybe a red or yellow border, and an icon. Preferably inside the content area, just like Wikipedia does on disputed articles or current events. His banner has stylized fonts, a photo as a background, and as such looks like an ad or something decorative.
- vermilingua 4y agoExactly this, the infobox is common to effectively every wiki for purposes exactly like this one. They’re using mediawiki as their engine so they already have the support baked in.
- Blackthorn 4y agoThey used to have one on every page, but the creator of the website (for some reason I was never able to figure out) hated how it contained authorship information so he removed it from every page. My own wiki puts the "this is homebrew" information in said infobox, and has never received a single complaint about people mixing up homebrew and official content.
- dusted 4y agoReading the first parts, I thought "oh, he's just pissed that he has to do something actually smart to get people to notice" like a childish refusal to ignore the obvious.. Nobody has looked at a banner since the late 90s. It's surprising and interesting that he didn't understand it himself, after reading his own post, it should have clicked.
- Havoc 4y agoBecause it looks like an ad banner
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chris-laffra 4y agoThe first thing I saw when I visited the stackexchange link in this post, was a huge banner at the top of the page, which really confused me as it led me to think that this post was a clever and sarcastic meta-joke of some kind.
- MisterTea 4y agoBecause the color contrast of the site makes that banner shrink into the softer background. The sharp color scheme of black with bright pink combined with the font is so garish my eyes divert from it. I also think putting that text off to the far upper right on a page designed for left to right, top to bottom English readers means that text is in no mans land. On a wide screen readers eyes will move to the left and down to navigate. It feels that your attempt to make the banner "pop" had an opposite effect. You need to completely rethink the design of the banner in terms of color, placement, and text.
- ignoramous 4y agoHeh. One of the comments on an answer complete with a nice redesigned mock goes: This is really good, but I'd drop the word "PAGE" that isn't adding anything and have it just say "HOMEBREW" to focus on the detail that matters. Reminded me of Just remove the duck (2013), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137736
- izzydata 4y agoI think it is because it looks too much like an Ad. It is so different than the surrounding content that I assume it is not part of the pages design and thus ignore it.
- sowbug 4y agoThis is a variant of an XY Problem. The original question was, to paraphrase, why the website sucks. One answer given was that the site (a game wiki) had too much unofficial content compared to official content. Now the question becomes why an official/unofficial annotation on each page isn't working. I don't play the game, and until today I have never visited the site. But I doubt that the solution being discussed will have any material effect on the original problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
- darepublic 4y agoThe banner is not accessible, white on pinkish hues is hard to read. Product would want a full page popup to inform you its homebrew
- jimmaswell 4y agoDoesn't look like an ad to me, but it does look like a random fluff quote display or something as opposed to important information.
- velcrovan 4y ago“‘There is a game of puzzles,’ he resumed, ‘which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word — the name of town, river, state or empire — any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident.’” —From “The Purloined Letter” (1845) by Edgar Allen Poe
- macksd 4y agoThe explanations like banner blindness, etc. make sense to me, but I think there's still a problem in our society or species in general that people simply do not read things thoroughly. And when confronted with a problem, instead of going back and reading things thoroughly, they blame someone else. How many of us software engineers have had this exact experience: Someone runs into an issue with your software that can't be papered over because of inherent complexity, and they report the problem to you. You tell them the solution, and they tell you it should be documented. You tell them it is documented, and you even tell them where. They tell you it should be more prominent. I've had this happen where the warning was in bright red, bold letters at top in a separate box that said "WARNING!" but even after I sent them the link telling them it was documented, they still didn't see it. I'm sure this banner could improved. I'm not sure the problem could have ever been avoided or solved entirely.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoHow many of us software engineers have had this experience: you fight a code problem for an hour and then when you figure it out you realize a clear description of the problem was right there in the initial error message the entire time. We aren't above this or better about it. Knowing what to pay attention to is hard, people develop a huge and complex set of heuristics that sometimes let them down. Failing to account for that adequately may be a problem in our society but I don't think framing it as individuals failing at the virtue of "reading thing thoroughly" will be any kind of solution.
- apeace 4y agoI upvoted you because I appreciate the point you're trying to make. But also: if you're fighting code for an hour without reading the error message, you need to train yourself to start reading those messages right away! This is one of the first things I always work on when pair-programming with junior engineers. Test run fails in the console, they switch back to VS Code, start adding a console.log somewhere, and I say, "What did the error say?" Their debugging time drops by a lot, quickly. But I think your example still works, because this is something you learn to do through training and experience, not something that you inherently know to do.
- bearmode 4y agoPersonally I missed it because it looks like a shitty ad banner. I just mentally filter those out. The explanations make absolute sense to me.
- Sevii 4y agoBanners waste people’s time because they are not content. People subconsciously ignore them to save time.
- morpheuskafka 4y agoSince the rest of the site uses the standard MediaWiki theme, I would have expected something that looks similar to the page banners used on Wikipedia (cleanup needed, requested deletion, etc.). At first I didn't think there was any good reason not to notice their banner, but the more I look at it, it does look a lot like a banner ad. Especially since it goes wider than the text of the page itself.
- LordDragonfang 4y agoNote that Wikipedia refers to these as messages[1], not banners, which I feel helps explain the difference in how they're perceived - whereas banners are generally decorative, with contrasting design style, wikipedia message boxes use the same design language as the rest of the article's infoboxes (solid backgrounds, don't span the full content width, thin+dark border with an image or single thick colored side for emphasis) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_index/Cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_index/Clean...
- beardedman 4y agoSame reason people don't notice disruptive advertising anymore.
- jhoelzel 4y agoi dont think its really banner blindness, but rather the more general fact that i learned that most sites use these "areas" on the page either for advertisements, or kewl banners, none of which i actually am interested when reading the content of the page. I never have found any answer to any question in that particiular area. The colors also make me pay even less attention, and if you really wanted me to notice it, it would have been red text :D
- pvaldes 4y agoMy bet would be for the background of a violet starred sky, that reminds advertisement for esoteric and new age related products. As view tend to go towards the deeper part of a scene, this moves the eye away from the message. Unicorn colored Galaxies could work if you are the NASA, probably not so great in other cases.
- lawn 4y agoA lot of people are saying it's because it looks like an ad, and I agree, but my first thought was that it just looked like an ugly banner with the page title or something. Maybe I've been conditioned by poorly designed webpages.
- chimeracoder 4y agoAmusingly, this post is from 2018, and despite all the helpful (and correct) advice, they are still using the old, ineffective banner today in 2022.
- pvaldes 4y agoAnd is attracting people to the web just to watch the banner since 2018
- Gordonjcp 4y agoI am about 1.85m tall and about 100kg. I don't disappear like a sheet of paper when you see me from the side, and I'm pretty noticeable from the front and back. Often, I'm wearing a bright fluorescent orange waterproof jacket. People walk entirely the fuck into me all the the time. Not even on their phones or anything, and not "glancing-shoulder-bump" but full on walk-straight-into-guy-standing-there. My daily driver is a big noisy old Range Rover. Okay, dark blue is maybe not the most in-yer-face colour, but it's quite loud and it's easy to tell when you're near it. People walk out in front of me, all the time, or pull out in front of me or hop their bike off the kerb in front of me, all the time. My occasional work Landrover Defender - I don't often drive it, I've already got a tremendously capable off-roader, but sometimes I need to use the big roof rack or we need two 4x4s for a job - is literally Fire Engine Red, covered in red and yellow high-vis, and has big blue strobes on it (that we normally don't use). People walk out in front of it, pull out in front of it, hop their bikes off the kerb in front of it... did you guess "all the time"? Right, I knew you would! The more visible you are the harder you are to see. I don't know why.
- AnonC 4y agoTangentially, I find it funny that the answer to this states banner blindness on a site (and set of sites, i.e., StackExchange) that usually takes nearly half the screen on desktop with a useless banner that everyone just ignores and scrolls through. StackExchange could learn a thing or two about UX from ux.stackexchange. On topic, most people just don’t read on web pages and emails! They expect to be spoon fed in tweet increments through short messages.
- egypturnash 4y agoFollowup question: why has this not been changed, this question is three years old and yet the wiki under discussion still has the exact same homebrew banners that blend into the page's frame and have the "hey this is not official D&D content" part way over on the right, away from the natural eye-scanning flow.
- mudita 4y agoThere are several slightly different possible solutions, nobody agrees on which solution is best and nobody dares - or cares enough - to actually do something without having the ok from everybody else. Finally the discussion just peters out without anything happening. You can see the wiki’s admins talk about it here: https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/User_talk:Admin/Archive_3#Homebrew_banners_and_the_case_of_the_blind_users_.28DnD_Quest.29 https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/User_talk:Admin/Archive_3#Home... It ends with “Aye aye, I certainly won't be implementing anything before passing it by here first.” In my personal experience all the somewhat successful non-hierarchical communities I’ve been part of, had some principles which make it easy to get stuff done without waiting for an explicit agreement from everybody else. For example the consent-based government system Sociocracy encourages people to ask for objections instead of asking for agreement from the the others.
- drewzero1 4y agoThis was my first question as well. So many great answers given, and three years later absolutely zero change. To be fair, it sometimes takes me a really long time to get around to fixing things, but after so much discussion it's a bit sad to see it never went anywhere. Even just editing the graphic for colors and layout would make it harder to skip over.
- ysavir 4y agoMy question exactly, especially because blindness to this exact banner accidentally led me to slipping a homebrewed poison that looks like a potion into a D&D campaign and expecting the players to be familiar with it. Only to have them hand it to a sickly NPC. Oops.
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- jmull 4y agoI think the issue is a little more general than just banner blindness (which typically refers to ignoring banner ads). The page is chock full of distracting elements that have nothing to do with the content the user is looking for. The only way to read it is to mentally progressively block out the useless stuff. That banner fades easily and is probably one of the first things to go. Also, they think of the banner as a clear contrasting color, but it's mostly a background image with a graphical, stylized text overlay that blends on to it. It's camouflage really, not prominent at all. But I don't think graphical design should be a core competency of a good D&D resource center. There's almost some cred in their bafflement about why this doesn't work. I say put an [Unofficial] badge, with a distinct style and color next to each link and title. It will be on the content the users see.
- pavon 4y agoYeah, and banner blindness is about more than just things that look like ads. The top and side bars of webpages traditionally contain information about the website as a whole, and are not relevant to the specific page you are viewing. You look there to navigate away from the page you are on, but ignore them when digesting the content you came to read. This would be true even if ads hadn't ruined our expectations, and has analogs in other media. In a book, you don't expect users to read the header/footer (page number, chapter, etc) each time they turn a page. Those are there to navigate through the book more quickly, but are ignored once you get to where you want.
- topspin 4y ago> I think the issue is a little more general than just banner blindness Beyond banner blindness and also the general page design as you say I think there is another, more subtle problem as well: the user doesn't care about the distinction. "Official" vs "homebrew"? What does that even mean in the context of D&D gaming? Although I'm sure it's possible to fully appreciate the distinction by reading whatever legalese is provided I'm equally sure no one will. It's hard to make people notice things they don't want to notice. It's even harder when your callout looks like an ad festooning a clutter.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y agoI have a lot of YouTube videos on as background noise when doing chores. Mostly of the vaguely-informative entertainment variety. These have ubiquitous sponsor messages, usually for the same few companies. (PCBWay sponsors basically every electronics YouTuber out there, and NordVPN & Audible probably sponsor everyone else). Normally I'd just skip straight past the sponsor message (and YouTube's new 'most replayed' feature enables this pretty effectively, as these videos all have a massive spike where the sponsored message ends), but if I'm doing chores I can't and am actually forced to listen to the ad. I have found that I've tuned in to the subtle changes in tone of voice between "content" and "ad", to the point where I don't even hear the messages any more; they're just a void in my short-term memory.
- Doxin 4y agoSponsorblock is a pretty good plugin. Works most of the time.
- mmcgaha 4y agoI do the same thing with email. When people put a short sentence or something at the bottom of an email I often ignore it because it looks like a signature.
- headsoup 4y agoTo me it's quite simple. It's colour scheme does not indicate 'warning/NOTE.' I just looks like a happy themed title page. Make the text red, or put NOTE/Important! in bright, bold text etc and it'll get noticed.
- phendrenad2 4y agoI recently bought something from a big box electronics store, via their website, to be picked up in-store. I walked right past a large human-sized sign directing customers to go to the outdoor pickup area for mobile pickup orders. I didn't even see it. Kinda shocked me actually. (When I got to the counter, the sales clerk had an exasperated, ive-said-this-100-times-today tone in his voice when they said "pickup is outside"). So, what happened? I was focused on other things. I was trying to not be hit by vehicles while crossing the street. I was trying to aim my body at the doors. I was trying to avoid bumping into other pedestrians. I was trying to prepare my mobile pickup order in the app. What could have been done differently? You need to get these things right the first time. Once the user is in a mindset where they know where to go, signs to the contrary won't be noticed. The store's app told me to go to the counter, so I went. If the app had initially showed me a message like "Oh, at this location we do things differently, pickup is always outside" I think that would have worked. The design principle is: You need to get in front of the user's eyes somehow. A brightly-colored banner isn't going to stop a user who's used to tuning out banners. Banners are where websites put ads and beg for donations. If you want a user to see pertinent information, you need to put it EXACTLY where the user will look. Make the page show half of the D&D role playing info, and make them click a button to expand the rest (coincidentally the button says "This is homebrew content, hidden so you notice this, this feature can be disabled with a checkbox at the top of the page")
- pessimizer 4y agoIf your "in-store" pickup isn't in the store, you need to say it as early and as often as possible.
- larrik 4y agoThis reminds me of the first time I used curb-side pickup at a DairyQueen that had opened during the pandemic. I followed the directions in the app, parked at a designated spot with clear signage, marked myself as there, and... nothing. Finally I went in, and got "oh, we don't do curbside pickup". I was already paranoid about it, and now I'll be forever.
- _Algernon_ 4y agoMy first thought seeing that was "ad". Not surprising really.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- abruzzi 4y agoI have a really hard time with motion--my brain is unable to block it. I've become very frustrated with, for example, news sites that instad of text and still images, have started showing animated clips or short videos. I've tried a firefox extension that is supposed to stop everything, but it doesn't work terribly well. I use "reader view" extensively, but it doesn't always work. (Incidentally, I have the same issue in real life when I go to a restaurant with a TV, so I intentially sit with my back to the TV.)
- mirekrusin 4y ago"Under the Radar" by J. Bond & R. Kirshenbaum was a good one on this topic – summary: people develop protective "radar" for ads and it explores ideas how to communicate effectively while taking it under account.
- Fargoan 4y agoThe websites look nearly identical to me
- WesleyHale 4y agoTypically elements that don't match the page theme are advertisements, and unless it was pointed out in this article, my brain would probably filter it out as noise believing it to be an ad.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoThe banner is positioned where the navbar is usually found on most websites. That's an area people tend to ignore unless they actually need to, you know, navigate.
- jjmorrison 4y agoFunny to also realize you are not noticing the giant banner on Stackexchange :)
- 6yyyyyy 4y agoI've been using ad blockers for so long, sometimes I forget that the web even has ads. A while ago I sent a friend a link to something I found online, not realizing it was full of porn ads and scam ads. I had to convince him to get off the phone with "Microsoft".
- quasarj 4y agoI have been as well, however there are still large sections of pages that almost always contain irrelevant information. I have gotten stuck several times where I'm trying to scan for some piece of information but cannot find it, ultimately to find it's in an area that I literally did not see because I automatically ignore it..
- larodi 4y agoIt’s very easy. Some people don’t know English so we’ll or internet slang to understand what homebrew pages are all about :) no offense to these ppl, just the site audience is perhaps really diverse.
- aaron695 4y ago
- duxup 4y agoI once worked at a company where technical support teams occasionally failed to follow a procedure listed in the CRM application. They were human, it happens. But that was beyond the ability of one manager to understand. His response was to put in a request to have the procedure… blink with a blink tag…(he knew some html). The procedures were sometimes multiple pages, and he wanted them to blink… The guy who managed the CRM told him the blink tag was deprecated and would “crash the CRM”. He later told me that of course a little JavaScript could do it but “I couldn’t do that to other humans.”
- fomine3 4y agoThe font is hard to read for me. It's interesting that the banner is still there.