The rise of intrusive online advertising and the response of user experience research at Yahoo!

Abstract

Over the past five years, online advertising has shifted dramatically toward much greater levels of intrusiveness in an effort to increase advertising effectiveness. Advances in user experience through good design or improvements in usability in many products have been tarnished by forms of online advertising that have become increasingly annoying to users. Since advertising is often the primary source of revenue for many products, user experience design and research teams have had to accept online advertising as a "design constraint," with little influence on the advertising format selected. Here, we describe the emergence of a new user experience research role and our ongoing effort at Yahoo! to understand the nature and negative impacts of online advertising on user experience, with the goal of feeding this knowledge into the decision making process for ad formats, ad characteristics, and where ads are best placed within the Yahoo! network.