World Wide Web working whilst ignoring graphics: good news for web page designers

Many web pages are made up of blocks of text with surrounding graphics. In some cases these graphics are animated in a variety of different ways. A common task of web users is to search the text on a web page for some information of interest and, often, this is what such pages' designers expect. Where information extraction from text is likely to be the primary concern of both web users and designers, then it is useful to know if typical, current examples of surrounding graphics, animated or static, distract people from their primary information extraction task. An experiment using realistic web pages supports the view that experienced web users are not distracted by surrounding graphics. This is good news for web page designers because such graphics are often considered highly desirable, and are sometimes commercially essential as paid advertising. Data on the time it takes to search for information on web pages and their perceived complexity are also presented. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.