Search Boxes and Banner Blindness

Matt comments on the technorati redesign and points to the early acknowledgements of banner blindness. Combine that with search box placement and you’ve got a problem.

• Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design 1999
• Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss “Obvious” Links 1998

He also adds that there’s danger in just moving the search box down:

When we did the first couple of designs of the BBC search engine, we were always trying to push for the 1/3 down and centre position for the text box. The place that stands out from Bernard’s study and, yup - the place Google and Yahoo have their search input box… But what we also found in our testing…was that if the search box was in that ‘sweet spot’…boxed in, or sounded by other design elements - the banner blindness kicked in again.

“Bernard’s study” is Examining User Expectations of the Location of Web Objects, and I link to some similar work in a previous post.