When starting to use a new application, we all know that it sometimes can be a little bit strenuous to get started. Although we believe that functions in programs should be self explanatory, that can sometimes be hard to achieve - specially if your app deals with a domain that’s new to the user. The user might also understand a certain function but wonder what it can be used for.

Things, one of the best "getting things done" applications out there, both takes care about explaining its model and also inspires you to get started. Until the user adds data to the different modules, each one shows a tip what it is and what it can be used for.

Honestly, aren't we living in an advertisement bubble? Millions of dollars are spent every day on online advertisement despite a generally low click-through rate and, as we see it, an increasing banner rage among the users. One of the most popular plugins for Firefox is Adblock Plus. The Norwegian browser Opera has built in ad blocking, the same goes for OmniWeb.

But why this resistance towards ads? Here's our top five list of why banners are unpopular:

1. They are annoying: When was the last time you really enjoyed an ad on the Internet? Never have? Welcome to the club. Would you accept a newspaper or magazine where the ads are moving around, playing videos and making sounds and even sometimes pops up in front of your face? Probably not.
2. Users don't see them: One of the biggest usability guys around, Jakob Nielsen, stated in one of his alertboxes that users rarely look at ads on websites. Why show something people don't see? It doesn't make sense to us. And the ads users actually see often claim to be something else, e.g. a dialog from your computer. This pisses people off.
3. They are irrelevant: We did a simple empirical test to see how relevant ads are to us. By surfing around 5 minutes on mainstream websites we were presented with only irrelevant banners. Some examples: one wanted to us to start using Viagra (neither of us has reached the age of 25), another recommended Vista (we both run Mac OS X, what's the chance we would switch?), a third proposed a deal with Verizon Wireless (not available in Europe) and a fourth wanted to us to read more about apartments reserved for 55+ citizens outside Stockholm (again, not close in age and neither of us live in Stockholm). What's the conclusion of all these banners and probably 99% of all the others out there? They are totally irrelevant.
4. They consume bandwidth: Despite fast Internet connections, we don't want to use more bandwidth than we really have to. Ad intensive websites can often be well over 100 KB in size and sometimes the ad servers are painfully slow. Speed will always matter.
5. They are processor intensive: Many banners are interactive and therefore built with Flash. The technology can sometimes be good, but you don't want to run it every time you visit a website because of the processing power they generate. Just think about the environmental impact Flash ads have each day.

Will this kill the Internet industry? Not really. First of all, big and evil media corporations did not invent Internet as another channel for advertisement mania. Secondly, quality has a value and you can charge people for using it. Some crappy websites will probably disappear, but who will miss them?

So, can online ads never be ok? Well, we don't find text ads à la Google that irritating, and they are often more related to the subject of the page you're browsing. The same goes for text search ads.

Two other good examples of how websites can have ads but still be user friendly are the advertising networks The Deck and Ad Mates. Although they differ in business model, both provide website owners with a small static ad. Not annoying, small in size and often relevant for the visitors.

Internet advertising needs to mature otherwise the users will kill it.