predisposition and research

For our website, Bloomington Alternative, our group went in with some predispositions , one of which included, “people hate ads and will really want them removed because they are distracting.” We thought they were especially distracting when viewing this site. So we decided to construct a survey. Some of the questions were very specific to features or potential features of the site. The other questions were more geared towards general web design preferences, including one that asked about sponsor images and ads being distracting.

Our group was very surprised when the majority of our survey audience disagreed. Since our predisposition was wrong, we needed to explore further. We came up with a few possibilities:

Perhaps they disagreed because they were not thinking about the specific website, but rather, websites in general, probably websites that they are very familiar with and have built up a natural eye for those familiar sites to avoid ad areas.

Perhaps the survey takers were more technological sophisticated than the audience we envisioned as the site’s target audience.

Perhaps we are entering a time where we are more comfortable with ads in our web space.

We decided to bring this into our interview session where we chose people who had different ages, backgrounds, and technological experience. This is where we gained the most insight on the subject. We could have a conversation about the general and specifics of ads and their impact. We discovered that the ads were found distracting, specifically in the case of Bloomington Alternative, not because they existed but because of the overall impact on the page as a whole. Because an entire column is devoted to ads, it makes the layout far too wide for most people who do not own wide screen monitors. People often found that the actual text content of the page was narrowed because of the ads. However, we did find that people were aware of ads being “normal” on websites and that most people seemed to easily be able to skip over them, comparing it to the ability some of us have with tuning out radio ads, television ads, and billboards. Some of them told us that the more they were on a particular website, the better they would be at not noticing ads. Only a couple people admitting to using Adblock or something similar, but they were on the higher end of technologically savvy.

I found this research interesting because at first we thought we knew exactly how the audience would respond. When we found that they did not, we assumed we were completely wrong because the survey results seemed so definite. Then we find out that while we did underestimate our audience, some of predispositions were correct, but perhaps we did not ask the right question the first time. But by asking the wrong question, we’ve gained insight that we would have not discovered otherwise.