Abstract
When reading interesting content or searching for information on a website, the appearance of a pop-up advertisement in the middle of the screen is perceived as irritating by a recipient. Interrupted cognitive processes are considered unwanted by the user but desired by advertising providers. Diverting visual attention away from the main content is intended to focus the user on the appeared disruptive content. Is the attempt to reach the user by any means justified? In this study, we examined the impact of pop-up emotional content on user reactions. For this purpose, a cognitive experiment was designed where a text-reading task was interrupted by two types of affective pictures: positive and negative ones. To measure the changes in user reactions, an eye-tracker (for analysis of eye movements and changes in gaze points) and an iMotion Platform (for analysis of face muscles’ movements) were used. The results confirm the impact of the type of emotional content on users’ reactions during cognitive process interruptions and indicate that the negative impact of cognitive process interruptions on the user can be reduced. The negative content evoked lower cognitive load, narrower visual attention, and lower irritation compared to positive content. These results offer insight on how to provide more efficient Internet advertising.
Highlights
Attention and Emotional State.Intrusive web advertising, such as animated, pop-up, layer ads, and other informational content appearing in any part of the screen, drag the users’ attention away from their primary task: reading or navigating through the main content of web pages
To reliably measure the user’s natural responses, the keys were the eye-tracker and the iMotions Facial Expression Analysis Module employed during the experiment
In order to determine if the negatively loaded content attracted more focal user attention and incurred lower cognitive load compared to positively loaded content, an eye-tracking signal was acquired from the experiment and analyzed with two metrics: ratio of fixation duration in the area of interest (AOI, covering the analyzed stimuli) to fixation duration on the slide of the experiment where the stimuli was displayed (FDP); and saccade velocity (SCV) when the affective picture was displayed
Summary
Intrusive web advertising, such as animated, pop-up, layer ads, and other informational content appearing in any part of the screen, drag the users’ attention away from their primary task: reading or navigating through the main content of web pages. This approach is a standard procedure used by advertisement designers who use their marketing activities to ensure advertisements are delivered and noticed. As was observed in early studies related to TV marketing [4], the increased usage of invasive forms of advertising leads to ad avoidance This pattern strengthens for various forms of interactive media such as pop-up ads [1], video content [5], and within social media [6]
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