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We have a request from a C-Level manager to place specific piece of content top center on our intranet homepage permanently. The approved art is 500 x 176px on a fixed 1,000px layout.

My concern is that by having content permanently placed in the top center area of the homepage, it will eventually create blindness to that content. I assume this will make the communications effort less effective than it could be in another format.

Question:
Are there any prinicples regarding the effectiveness of a carousel design vs a static banner?
Are there any other tools recommended techniques to prevent "banner blindness"?

RWL01
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    This is a good place to start: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/10312/are-carousels-effective – Charles Wesley Aug 29 '13 at 00:05
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    Could you kindly clarify a few things: What do you mean by "Front"; What is the content (people may ignore the content because of the content, not its position); what do you mean by "rotating" and "static" and what does it have to do with "front and center"? – Izhaki Aug 29 '13 at 10:28
  • Thanks for the feedback, I've updated the question to better articulate my point. – RWL01 Aug 30 '13 at 15:56

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I don't exactly know what the nature of the content is, but the development of banner blindness depends on the extent to which the user finds the content routinely irrelevant.

When you first make the change, people will notice it. If it's something useful – say, a quick link to a document that people have to reference several times a day – then users are likely to appreciate the change. In such case you don't have to worry about banner blindness.

If the content is objectively useless – "always fill out your TPS reports!" –, then you're going to have a lot of issues. The only cure for banner blindness is increased relevance (better content) or novelty (new design, different content, motion, etc.), with novelty being less effective.

As for your to specific questions:

  • Carousels are almost universally understood to be practically useless for anything other than impressing clueless clients with sparkles
  • As stated before, the only sure cure for banner blindness is improve the quality of content such that it is interesting and relevant. Everything else is just rearranging deck chairs.

/edit

And in a very timely post Jakob Nielsen lets us know that people generally scroll past carousels, but lists some principles to use if you have to make them work: Designing Effective Carousels: Create a Fanciful Amusement, Not a House of Horrors

Jeremy T
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I would also question whether a slideshow or hero image is the best solution to communicate your message.

Ask, How does the content you are trying to communicate relate to the other goals of this page? Is there another, possibly more contextual way to do this elsewhere?

morgmj
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  • This doesn't really answer the question though. Can you expand this so that you are explicitly providing an answer? – JonW Sep 13 '13 at 20:40