A Rant on Visual Clutter on the Web --Don't Frustrate Your Reader
Post date: Jul 16, 2015 5:39:54 PM
Blog post #4, for July 17
Who has not seen some tempting photo or headline on a side article on Facebook and clicked on it, eager to read about the cast of Matilda, that funny and wise kids’ movie we all liked so well. However, instead of going to a simple web page with text and pictures, we are confronted with a page so cluttered with ads, and confusing visual signals (arrows above and below, next, previous) that we are afraid to click anywhere! Visual clutter is ruining the web.
For those children growing up with the internet, it may be no big deal. Maybe they take it for granted. For those of us who grew up newspapers and magazines, we understand that the paid advertisements make it more financially feasible for those publications to exist. But I do not recall the battle for the eye/attention in our print publications that many web pages present to readers today. It was easier to tell the ads from the news! More importantly, the explosion of visual clutter contributes to our growing inability to focus on our original task: find out what happened to that cute little girl who played Matilda!
So, on the page with the article about the cast of Matilda that I intended to read, there is an ad right overhead for Fiverr, which is something I know about and have written about. What would you do for $5? Would you create a logo, edit a couple of pages, or design a form? Do you need someone to do that? You can post your $5 jobs and others will pick them up. But now I am thinking about something very different than looking forward to viewing pictures of the cast of Matilda.
So I finally get the courage to click on what I hope is the arrow to go to the next picture, and yes, there she is—quite grown up, poised, but she still has that great little smile. Now, however, the white space that was below the picture is filled with yet another ad and has an arrow for something called #1 Jira. Who doesn’t want to be #1? It sounds like a High School Geek Squad Cheerleader’s chant. “C’mon, Jira! We’re number one!” Yet again, the awkward placement of this ad creates a visual interruption that makes it more likely that the careless reader will see the arrow and click on that, instead of the next icon to go to the next picture. I have no idea what Jira is, and frankly, I don’t care!
AHA—when I check it out, at least the little Jira arrow has the integrity to say, “Visit site” so that I can see my error and go below to find the correct arrow to go to the next picture. But I am starting to feel a little less excited about repeating this procedure to see all of the dozen slides: still, I really want to see Danny DeVito and there he is, but there is another silly ad below him, again, in the direct path of my mouse.
I am starting to see a pattern: and I am more than a little annoyed. In a society that has grown tired of power point, why do people subject us to this endless clicking through a slide show of pictures? Apparently, it is to shamelessly sell ad space to companies that you and I may never encounter otherwise. I click on, with less enthusiasm than ever, because I really like Danny’s wife, Rhea. Something strange happens however: the first time I click, nothing happens and when it finally does, I am further annoyed when the little bit of text seems shoved down further, and another ad is placed between it and the picture.
I finally abandon watching this slideshow, wondering if the CIA and other spy agencies know about this torture tool, and how many slides it would take for the average bad guy to break down and sob like a little girl. Then, I click on “About” and discover that clipd.com is a trivia website. I take a deep breath and look back at the article about the cast of Matilda one more time—and see the words “view as list” above the article title.
Clipd is not the only offender: there are numerous pages where it is getting harder and harder to figure out the content from the clutter. Many of them are quasi-news sites about popular culture or entertainment. If I were made Queen of the Web, I would declare that it was illegal to place ads between the content and the navigational controls. It makes me wonder who is in charge of web design these days – the content people or the advertising people? Shades of Mad Men of the Future—where’s Don Draper when you need him to yell at some flunky, “NO….you don’t put that arrow for the ad so close to the arrow to advance to the next picture!”
So please, if you have anything to say about designing or placing advertisements on a website, do our eyes and brains a favor. We expect to see the ads on the sides….but it is violating that social contract (we will enjoy our “free” content but acknowledge your ads on the sides of the web page) to make it even harder to read our article about the cast of Matilda. Let’s not put ads between content and navigation to more content. Don’t frustrate your readers!
“13 Pics That Show The Cast Of "Matilda" Then And Now,” from Clipd
In the maddening slide-by-slide torture format
http://www.clipd.com/actors/21297/13-pics-that-show-the-cast-of-matilda-then-and-now?pid=null
In a more sane format, as a list