Bruce writes:

> This may not be the case. Several years ago, a good friend of mine who
>  runs the Internet operations for a large financial services company was
>  having an argument with her web designers. The new requirement was to
>  display some particularly important user-specific notifications on the
>  page that the user sees immediately after login. The designers wanted to
>  put it at the top of the page. My friend said that the top of the page
>  was a very silly place to put it, because the profusion of banner ads has
>  conditioned most people to ignore everything above any horizontal visual
>  break near the top of the page.
>
>  Luckily, this financial services ferm has a usability lab complete with
>  Orwellian visual-attention-tracking cameras. When they pulled a bunch of
>  people into the lab and sat them down in front of their web site, the
>  designers discovered that my friend was right: the gaze almost never went
>  above the bottom of the banner, no matter what they had there.
>
>  So putting two fixed lines at the top of every 3000-L post would likely
>  just result in everyone reading from the third line on.

The ready counter-argument to this is that the banner ads always appear in a
static place, on virtually every web page that you see. Not only are they
obnoxious, and thus intentionally not read, one does easily become habituated
to them.

But there is great value in being the odd-man out. If HP3000-L were the only
list that you commonly read that put such notifications in the first two text
rows, your normal expectation model would be that the first two rows of the
text would be among the most important and valuable lines in the email, thus
you would tend to read them with great interest.

I'm not really seriously suggesting that we do this. Such lines would be an
"irritant", in every possible sense of the word, but they would get noticed
and soon deeply engraved in everyone's engrams.

Wirt Atmar

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