IBM’s Cheap Banner Ad Tricks
When do you make the same sort of control do different things? In two situations:
- You’re lazy.
- When you want to trick someone into exposing a banner ad and blaring audio at them.
For an example of this, let’s look at this IBM banner ad I saw on ComputerWorld.com:
See that little Open link with the X on it. You’ve seen similar control types even on banner ads, mostly with the X Close thing to shut those BadBoys up, right? So one would assume that this banner ad requires a click to open it and expose its content.
Ha ha! Fool! This merely requires a roll-over to expose it and start its audio come-on blaring. Given that, at ComputerWorld.com, it sits in the right sidebar between the scrollbar and the content, the odds of the user inadvertently mousing over it are pretty high indeed.
When it’s open, look what we have:
Does the banner ad close on mouseout? Oh, but no; now, you do have to close the button to shut it down.
The two similar-looking controls behave differently, and not only that, but they behave differently in the fashion that will prove most annoying to the disinterested user.