Usability Forum

What really bothers me about intellitext

By Eddie LopezEddie_Lopez. Tuesday, June 20, 2006 2:32:59 PM

It's not just the fact that this is advertisement.

It's not even the fact that the ads look very similar to links.

It's not even that fact that the ads and links are mixed together into this jumbled soup of underlined words.

It's the fact that I'm a (self-termed) "mouse follower." I follow with my mouse what I'm reading on the screen. I'm even known to highlight chunks of text as I read. Partly to remember where I'm at if my attention gets diverted, but mainly out of some subconscious habit I have. The precursor to the highlight is the "mouse follow."

When I see this chunk of text in the screenshot here (which I looked up to get an understanding of what is being discussed by Alok Dube in this post)- it's almost like a mine field to me... I never notice the mouse follow when I'm surfing around, but when I come into contact with intellitext, I can notice it right away because I feel myself trying to avoid "going in" to that conglomeration of links.

I haven't tried this myself yet- but there was a comment on this post on how to filter out intellitext.

Blinded by the light...Less is less?: iTunes podcast management

Comments

greybeat # Wednesday, June 21, 2006 7:46:14 AM

I used to do the same thing -- highlight text to keep my eyes from burning out f there is an intense amount of text to get lost in and just if the background is white (or gawd forbid, red). I say "used to" cause this is a habit I'm killing off, with all the landmines (to borrow your analogy) out there today, from sound (one of my biggest personal beefs) to unexpected things popping up here and there, it's just safer to keep your mouse away from it all.

I could rant about this for hours, but sleep calls....

Eddie LopezEddie_Lopez # Wednesday, June 21, 2006 12:44:07 PM

I tried a rudimentary search of his site, but Jensen Harris mentioned something about this in the Office 2007 interface blog he posts to.

Basically, the Office 2007 team was going to add some functionality (or context menu or something) that gets activated when you highlight text. But they found that a large number of users were like me- they just highlighted as they read with no intention of doing anything to the text.

I'm sorry, I can't find the article, but here's the blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/default.aspx

Anonymous # Saturday, May 12, 2007 5:18:55 AM

thetshirtblog writes: That's why I'll probably stay away from intellitext on my blog. I love the way the ads blend into text, but I feel like the links are of little value, and I'll just lose viewership because of annoyance factor.