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Ian Alton

Desperation Dialogs: Why Does the Web Constantly Interrupt Us?

Years ago, during an introductory web design course, my teacher asked a simple question: “What is the one thing you hate most on a website?” One person couldn’t stand loading screens that hid partially-loaded content behind them. Another person hated comment sections, and presented a case that he was at the site for the content, not other readers’ “ranting and opinions”. I said I hated websites with lengthy animations created in Flash (at the time, this was still a bit of a problem).

I thought it was interesting that everyone seemed to be bothered by something different. I lacked the experience then to know what I now know: we didn’t all hate different things. We were using different examples to illustrate how we all hated the same thing: websites whose design put them at odds with what we wanted from them. We went there for the content, and everything that got in the way of that content was bad.

A modal dialog designed to appear just in time to stop you from consuming this website’s content.

So, it’s not a leap to get to one of my principal complaints about the web today: unrequested, unnecessary modal dialogs (aka lightboxes) that interrupt our browsing experience. I call these “desperation dialogs”, as their shameless implementation often evokes a sense that something is begging for attention. Generally, these dialogs draw our attention, darken the site behind them to obscure its content, and require us to either sign up for something or scan for hard-to-see close buttons. Sometimes desperation dialogs appear when the website thinks we might be trying to leave. Some even lack a close button, replacing this bulwark of UI design with some passive-aggressive link like “No thanks, I’m not interested in learning new things.”

Desperation dialogs are special because, unlike the majority of user experience issues, they intentionally shirk usability heuristics and make people do things they don’t necessarily want to do.

Desperation dialogs don’t just annoy users. They actually damage your brand. In fact, these dialogs are worse than the pop-up ads of days gone, because they are symptomatic of a serious affliction of web content today.

This Isn’t a New Problem

Perhaps the worst part about this is that we recognized the problem years ago. Andy Beaumont created Tab Closed; Didn’t Read to draw attention to the issue, and even developed a browser extension that discourages websites from creating desperation dialogs. Yet, years have gone by, and the problem is more prevalent than ever.

OK, So Desperation Dialogs Generate Conversions

It’s not hard to see why these things have caught on. They work.

  • Mauro Andrea reports a 14.47% conversion rate over at Unbounce, which is pretty impressive.
  • Despite calling them “evil popup mode”, the folks over at Mail Chimp have begun to embrace them. Their logic was, unsurprisingly, concise: “they work”. One of Mail Chump’s customers, 3D Robotics, adopted the desperation dialog after a wildly successful A/B test (versus the old method of having a link in the footer).
  • SocialMediaExaminer.com grew its email list 375% over two years and attributes 70% of those signups to the site’s desperation dialog.
Another desperation dialog resulting from a successful A/B test.

Reality Check. Your Users Aren’t Analytics. They’re People.

All the rationale behind these disruptive dialog boxes teeters on the idea that they generate conversions. Of course they generate conversions. Look at them. The problem is, there’s more to this than conversions.

  1. Just because users will interact with these dialogs doesn’t mean they like them or want to see them. People almost unanimously hated these exact design patterns fifteen years ago, even more than they hated blinking text (which was so bad that the HTML specification deprecated the practice and all major browsers stopped supporting blink). Remember how my whole class hated websites whose design put them at odds with the reason we were there? Your user is already looking at your content right now, which is why they came to your site. Why would you build a barrier to this? And, no, these dialogs are not a momentary distraction. We already know that even brief interruptions like incoming emails can break someone’s concentration and require several minutes of reorientation. Desperation dialogs don’t interrupt an otherwise good user experience. They break it.
  2. Not everyone understands that these dialogs can be dismissed. There’s a reason these dialogs are designed with prominent calls-to-action and hard-to-find close options. Users who believe they need to enter an email address to continue will do so if they want to see your content badly enough, and many of them do.
  3. Conversions from these dialogs don’t reflect what the user wants. They reflect what the business wants. It’s easy to forget that business goals and user goals aren’t always the same. And that’s OK —goals don’t have to be perfectly aligned to craft a great user experience. But when you use these dialogs to convert users, you’re making many of them do something they had no intention of doing. Then, they receive your emails, at least for a while, perceiving them to be yet more junk in the sea of unopened emails that littler their inboxes already.
  4. Desperation dialogs send a message that damages your brand. Particularly in the case of desperation dialogs that appear when a site fears you might be trying to leave, desperation dialogs are a particularly needy design pattern that aren’t without consequences. I can’t say it better than Kate Meyer of the Nielsen Norman group:
“Every website has a personality. The visual design, the interaction design, the copy, and tone of voice all contribute to how your users perceive your site and your brand. Needy patterns like the please-don’t-go popover … chip away at the presentation of a professional, confident website.”
Kotaku’s newsletter signup is prominently placed, but it doesn’t intrude or obscure content, and it can be dismissed.

The reality is that desperation dialogs are symptomatic of a more serious problem. Websites prioritize conversions and social media likes over content, and forget that a conversion and a happy user aren’t the same thing, especially when goal metrics are at odds with what people actually want. The challenge in the years ahead will be to convince designers and executives to sacrifice some short-term wins like these conversions in favor of long-term success: quality, trustworthy content from a brand your users remember and respect.

There are better ways to win loyalty.

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