Screen Blindness: How to Overcome Selective Attention and Get Work Messages Noticed

It’s like the screen wasn’t even there. No matter what Apple training specialist Kevin Mason tried, no one was signing up for training classes advertised on a screen in his repair shop. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. He tried “different fonts, animations, catchy phrases and even flashing lights.”

His customers were seemingly “totally blind to anything with a screen,” relayed Mason. They’d walk by the screen, but would automatically tune out anything on it.

Screen blindness affects us all. We’re so accustomed to TVs and other screens in lobbies, elevators, office walls, billboards, and more that we tune them out without even thinking about it. When’s the last time you noticed what was on the TV in a lobby? That’s screen blindness.

Screen blindness risks making your company’s TVs and digital signage less effective than they could be—or, potentially, virtually invisible to your team. Here’s how to combat screen blindness, and build company TVs that both get noticed and deliver value to your company.

From Banner Blindness to Screen Blindness

Screen blindness—visually ignoring entire screens—started on a far smaller scale as banner blindness. From the earliest days of the internet, we instinctively learned to skip over banner ads to get to the important content. The habits became so deeply ingrained that they kept us at times from finding the data we were looking for in the first place.

“The biggest problem I had switching to DuckDuckGo,” said Letterpress founder Loren Brichter of the alternate search engine, “was completely missing the top couple of results because I’m so habitualized to think they’re ads.”

Over decades of scanning Google’s 10 blue links, Brichter, like most of us, learned to skip the first few results assuming that they’re advertisements. The top results were still there. His eyes quickly scanned past them, with muscle memory directing his eyes to what normally would be the first organic results.

It’s a phenomena discovered shortly after the internet and personal computing went mainstream. “People searching for specific information on the web tend to ignore large, colorful items that are clearly distinguished from other items on the page,” found a 1997 study, in one of the earliest cases of what the next year would be labeled banner blindness. It’s a phenomena that has continued—and, perhaps, intensified, as a 2018 Nielsen Norman Group study found—to this day.

Ads in the early 90’s were bright, colorful banners. Billboards, of a sort, along the top or sides of websites. Relevant ads—a hotel ad in a travel article, say—might get noticed, but irrelevant ads quickly taught us to ignore them. Marketers fought back, adding animation, flashing text, dancing babies. Nothing worked long term. One irrelevant ad that slowed down our browsing experience and our brains would start ignoring that new design.

Ads weren’t the only content affected; “‘banner’ blindness can occur with text items that do not look like advertisements,” too, found Rice University researchers. “One item separated visually from everything else on a web page may be completely ignored by web searchers, even by searchers who are deliberately searching for the information provided in that item,” they wrote.

The same applied outside of the web. We tune out TV commercials automatically, notice players more than the ads around a stadium’s field, drive past billboards and directional signs alike with scarcely a notice, scarcely notice airplane safety demonstrations before takeoff. We’re blind to all but what we think contains what we’re looking for.

No wonder it’s so easy to ignore messages on office signage.

The bright spot at the end of the tunnel

“Users don’t look around much,” concluded Jakob Nielsen in a 2012 study for his eponymous research group. 

Banner and screen blindness alike aren’t new human conditions. Much like tunnel vision, the health condition with actual peripheral vision loss, screen and banner blindness are a form of selective attention. You focus on what’s right in front of your eyes, and ignore everything else to the point of not seeing it at all.

“Selective attention is really a survival instinct,” wrote Nielsen. “If people had to pay attention to all stimuli in the environment, they'd never get anything done.”

It’s not specifically about tech, screens, and ads. Science writer Gabriel Popkin discovered what he called “tree blindness”—the phenomena of walking by trees daily without really noticing them, without attention taken up by conversations or smartphones. We’d miss the forest for our screens.

We’ve evolved to focus on what’s most important and to ignore things less deserving of our attention. Yet the same skill that in the wild helps us ignore the sound of wind and notice the sound of a predator is what makes your customers and team ignore important information on screens.

How to earn attention and fight screen blindness

So you could build an animatronic tiger that jumps out whenever people walk by your office TV. That’d get their attention, all right, until you fool them twice and they learn to ignore the commotion.

But there’s something to the idea. Unexpected objects are more likely to be noticed at first, until quickly they become expected—and ignored. A new construction site grabs your attention the first time you see it. New content on a billboard you’ve driven past a hundred times, though, is less likely to get your attention.

That means you need to start out strong when you first roll out digital signage. You have a tiny window of time to earn and keep your team’s attention, before they build up change blindness, the “failure to notice something different about a display.”

Which means you have to build your office TV with the insights gained from decades of fighting banner blindness and selective attention.

1. Place important content in the center of the screen.

“It is better to not place the ‘important’ items at the top because the user looks there last,” found the original Rice University study on banner blindness.

That’s because people tend to “start viewing the page in the center, and examine the very top and bottom only after they determine what they want is not located in the center.”

Important content, though, might not be your companies’ core messaging. It might be time, weather, news, sports scores, and other things your team will look up on their phone when they have a moment of downtime. The best content for your company TV is things people want to see.

Put that front-and-center, right from the first day you roll out signage. The unexpected TV will get noticed, the content will keep their attention, and you’ll have won the first battle in staving off screen blindness.

2. Put messages that need to be noticed near content people are looking for

You’ve caught the viewer's attention with your core content in the center. Now, put the important thing you want people to see nearby.

As the Gestalt law of proximity states, “items that are close to each other are assumed to be part of a group and thus related in function.”

Imagine an article with a title, then an image, then a paragraph of text. Most people will automatically skip the title, assuming its placement makes it irrelevant. Simply grouping all of the text together helps it escape the peripheral and get noticed by even the most tunnel visioned-person.

3. Format important messages similar to the content people want to see

Content that looks drastically different from other content will be ignored as irrelevant. Just as with banner blindness of old, flashy animations, bright colors, and cute fonts on your signage will be more likely to be ignored as people will assume it’s an ad. Even placing content on the top or right of a website is enough to make people ignore it.

It’s bad enough that people will not see things they actually want to see, if they look different enough. “One item separated visually from everything else on a web page may be completely ignored by web searchers, even by searchers who are deliberately searching for the information provided in that item,” found the original banner blindness study.

The trick, the Nielsen Group found, is to group important information together with the same styling. Make your company’s important information look similar to the general interest updates you’re sharing, and people will notice them. Use separate branding and colors, and people will notice only the content they want and learn to ignore your more important messages.

4. Never trick your audience, or they’ll learn banner blindness

Now imagine you have a company-wide message you want to make sure everyone notices. You could cancel all other programming on your company TV, and make a bright red sign that grabs everyone’s attention.

They’ll notice, alright. But if the message isn’t truly critical—an emergency announcement, say, when there’s truly an emergency—then people will learn to avoid your tricks in the future.

That’s a “hot potato” problem. Burn them once, and their brain will remember far longer than you’d expect. When there’s a real emergency, they’ll have developed screen blindness enough that they might not even see the warning.

Build better team signage that people want to notice

It’s not that your team purposely avoids reading the signage you’ve invested time and resources into. It’s that the same selective attention that helps them focus on projects and get work done is also what keeps them from noticing irrelevant signage and bulletin boards back in the day.

Simply switching your announcements to a screen isn’t enough. Your team will quickly develop screen blindness if the updates are undifferentiated from a bulletin board.

So show them what they want to see. Put interesting things in the center of the screen—especially when you first roll out signage, and at the times of day when people enter the office and first see your screens. Put important, less interesting things nearby, formatted similarly. And never take your team’s attention for granted.

Keep those principles for beating banner blindness in mind, and you’ve got a chance at avoiding screen blindness in your team, too.

Image Credit: Header photo by Artur Voznenko via Unsplash; Tunnel photo by Jaanus Jagomägi via Unsplash