In lieu of mind reading…   

Atticus Finch said it best at the end of To Kill a Mockingbird when he told his children, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." His point is relevant to many things in life, including the findings of the clutter study Dynamic Logic released at the ARF conference in Chicago. That research showed that the perceived clutter level was more relevant to advertising effectiveness than the pre-defined clutter levels of a given web page.

When designing a site it is important to understand the visitation experience from the users' perspective and not just presume to know what they think. A site rollout affords only one opportunity to win over first time visitors. The likelihood of creating a loyal user base will only increase if the site is designed from the actual users' perspective - not based on assumptions of what will be appealing or compelling to users. This will help convert a casual user into a repeat and ultimately loyal visitor, which will best position the site to attract advertisers looking to communicate with an engaged user base.

There are many ways to gather this insight - focus groups, qualitative research (surveys) and IDIs (In-Depth Interviews), just to name a few. Regardless of how you gather the intelligence, listen to how users feel and apply that feedback to the design of a user-centric media property.

Leave the mind reading up to Miss Cleo.

molly@dynamiclogic.com

New Rules of Clutter

In traditional advertising research, the number or amount of advertisements within a given block of program content generally defines clutter. Several studies have shown that a high amount of clutter can reduce advertising effectiveness in offline media.¹ The fact that clutter can reduce ad effectiveness is logical. It is likely that a lone billboard ad on a highway in the desert will be noticed more than the same billboard in the middle of Times Square. Intuitively, it seems harder to break through a highly cluttered environment than a bare one.

On the Web, however, it's not appropriate to define clutter by the number of ads per page. Some sites have four or five ads, but if the site is clean and well organized, the ads' visibility can be high. Other sites are so busy with links, graphics, and animation that even a lone ad can be hard to notice. Indeed, as AdRelevance has found, the range of the number of ads per page on top Web sites is small.

Dynamic Logic decided to apply a simple formula for defining clutter--counting the number of "elements" (words, pictures, graphics) on a page. We started with a page from iVillage, a site that has scored better than average compared to Dynamic Logic norms, and made changes to the page, making high, medium and low clutter pages. While our definitions did not create significant differences, we still found that clutter is important. However, like beauty, clutter is in the eye of the beholder---in this case, Web users.

As with many comparisons between traditional and online advertising, the game appears to be very similar with a few different rules. Depending on the nature of various media, clutter is defined in different ways; however, it seems that clutter affects advertising effectiveness regardless of where it appears.

¹Webb, Peter H. and Michael L. Ray, "Effects of TV Clutter." Journal of Advertising Research 19, 3 (June 1979): 7-12).

jgraham@dynamiclogic.com