Comment by ygra
9 days ago
Also known as banner blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness). I'm genuinely surprised that a UX person doing usability testing (for a website!) has never heard of this. But I guess there's people missing basic knowledge in every field.
Let's also note that they did say "25 years ago". UX research then and now was, at the very least, different, and there was less experience with web-specific behaviour. I'd also note that it was mostly graphic designers doing web design back then, or maybe that's just me.
To be fair it was quite a long time ago, and as I recall the person guiding and asking questions was from the market research company. The web designers and whatnot was not in the room, but viewed the session remotely and could tell the person with me what to ask and such.