E*Trade’s homepage from January 2001
Visual dead zones reduced E*Trade’s ability to communicate with their target customers, because low percentages of people read their promotional content.
This is an old story*, but one of my favorites because it illustrates an important point, yet was really fun:
We eyetracked E*Trade’s homepage and then inserted gibberish into it to illustrate that content in a "visual dead zone" doesn’t get read and might as well not exist.
To identify parts of E*Trade’s homepage that weren’t being viewed, we collected eyetrack data on just 4 people (not too many people, eh?) as they surfed E*Trade’s website to decide for themselves whether they wanted to sign up for E*Trade’s services. We found that about 1/5 of the screen real estate above the fold was being wasted, so once we located un-viewed areas, we came up with gibberish to replace the existing text on a cached version of their homepage (this was a lot of fun!).
Examples of the gibberish tested on E*Trade’s homepage:
- FDIC distrusts us * No Bank Quality * Will Lose Value
- Not ready to event an insurance? Tax group of our manager discussion free of funds.
- Get $25 to close an E*Trade Bank Money Market Plus Advice! Tax a gear cool and ATM access!
- …and more
Then, we re-tested the modified homepage in the lab. As a secondary test, we also sent it out to a bunch of people who we didn’t eyetrack. After people had seen the page while evaluating whether they were interested in signing up for E*Trade’s services, we asked them if there was anything strange about the homepage. Only 1 in 25 people noticed!
The moral of the story is, if you wish to optimize your content: If content on your webpage is in a visual dead zone, it might as well not exist. People can’t click on what they don’t see. Money and time spent on content in a visual dead zone is wasted.
* This is an old E*Trade website — we ran this test in January 2001. Since then, E*Trade has become a client, and is very proactive in working to improve the experience for their customers.
