Consider web ads more like annoying bus boys trying to get you to order something in their restaurant by stepping in front of you and mirroring every move.
You went outside, you motivated yourself, and passing by a sign is not much now. My laptop is a bit of a promise of lazy direct access, which is more at odds with the ads.
Also street ads have been planned, there are usual spots and looks. Web is a bit wilder.
This is an excellent point to make: Streets are for getting from A to B, and ads don't impede that.
The Internet is for getting access to information, and many of the online ad formats do impede that.
> We cannot make the entire world ideal for everyone.
Huh? So just f** accessibility and leave everyone on their own? I'd understand if you'd argued that it wouldn't be feasible to do a particular thing, but such general statements leave a very bad taste.
Maybe i'm too oblivious to IRL ads.
For a long time I thought that was all just due to crowds/stress and nothing else, but I'm increasingly convinced that part of it is just that it's harder for me to pick out when scanning a room where the signs are the indicate where I'm supposed to be. Also seems to make it more likely that I'll walk past an indicator or miss something while I'm trying to navigate the space. I'm always paranoid inside of these busier spaces about whether I'm going to miss something important and end up walking in the opposite direction of where I need to go.
It may depend a lot on not just the area but also what you're personally used to; navigation in these spaces are a skill that people get better at over time. I suspect that some of the difficulties become less difficult as people's brains get better at filtering things out or recognizing indicators that they need to zero in on. In the same way that after a while playing a game you start to instinctively zero in on certain UX choices or indicators in a level, people also instinctively start to zero in on how a city indicates important information (is the sign always green, does it tend to show up in a specific place). So this might also be more of an early-user UX problem for people who don't go into the city all the time or who are particularly susceptible to getting distracted by motion/colors.
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There's a lot of research that brains are really good at learning to filter out advertising; part of the arms race in advertising isn't just with ad blockers, it's figuring out how to present ads in increasingly unusual ways where your brain won't just do pattern recognition and literally just refuse to process or register them. Human brains are heckin good at pattern recognition.
But that means that there is an arms race with advertisers trying to figure out what the next evolution is with billboards or how to trick your brain to register things, and it means that people who are less equipped to do that filtering or are just unfamiliar with the space often end up getting thrown in the deep end because their brains aren't trained to do that filtering yet, or are trained to filter different things.
