Why I love modals 🥰️

Modals get a lot of hate in the Design/Product community. And I kinda get it: designers love to think we can come up with elegant, responsive experiences and interfaces that don’t require us to “put more UI over the other UI” to solve user problems. We’d love to never draw another gray-shader-behind-a-light-box ever again.

But it’s an overly simplistic way to see the costs and value of modals. Here are some other perceived “negatives” I’ve heard about them:

• 🛠 Modals are hard to build: this one still comes up still from time to time, despite the libraries and other modern resources we have in the broader community 🤷‍♂️. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but modals come with a lot of considerations around positioning, sizing, scrolling, Z-axes, etc. that sometimes give engineers headaches.
• 🛑 They prevent the user from immediately interacting with whatever they want to: I suppose this is technically true, but I don’t see this as an inherently bad thing. Rather: Modals are one of the (many) interaction design methods you can use to focus attention and to bring clarity to what information is timely and important. It’s a form of progressive disclosure that really can be reactive to interface use, even if it’s often not the most most visually “elegant.”
• 🤦 People confused “modals” broadly with “pop-ups” specifically. Most modals I design are user-initiated: they are “asked” for and react to user needs. But a lot of us are plagued by memories of the Internet past — and in some cases, the present — where “modals” are often surprises to the user. These “pop-ups,” rather, are often modals designed to convince you to do something — e.g., sign up for a newsletter, give the vendor your phone number etc.—and should be used sparingly, at best. But we shouldn’t conflate these with modals that respond to user intent.

A onboarding modal sequence that we use for new Parabola users.

We use a lot of Modals at Parabola — most user-initiated, but, yes, a few system-initiated ones too—and I always characterize “modality” as being a really important part of our tool. So I wrote up an article 👇 on our company blog to explain why; I get into why they’re important for this product, and what advantages they bring more broadly in UI design!

Why we designed so many modals into Parabola | Parabola Blog

Check it out and let me know what you think ✌.️ And maybe while you’re there 😉, take a look at …

• Parabola in general: it’s an amazing automation tool designed for people who work in spreadsheets and tools, but don’t necessarily “code.” Here’s an intro video demo related to Ecommerce use cases. 🚀
• Our new blog: We just rebuilt this thing from ground up, and in my humble o-pinion, it’s looking pretty good! 🖌
• My article on automated breakpoint reporting: using, yep, Parabola!