The Attention Seekers
We all have seen them. Some of them are full screen pop-ups, some of them fade-in from all directions of the screen and some are ads. They are frustrating, almost always not requested by the user and are basically attention seeking. Here’s what the inventor of pop-up ads has to say, according to Wikipedia:
Ethan Zuckerman claims he wrote the code to launch advertisements in separate windows as a response to complaints of displaced banner ads. He didn’t invent the pop-up window. Zuckerman later apologized for the unforeseen nuisance pop-up ads had evolved into.
Not all of them ads. Not all of them are intrusive and in the face. Some of them have good intent and others are for legal purposes, such as the cookies notification. For example, I have recently come across a challenge at work to come up with a solution to get more feedback on our documentation website so that the authoring team can improve the documentation and better serve the users. Bringing a full screen pop-up to ask for feedback is definitely not the answer — the user is there on a knowledge base website to troubleshoot a problem in your product, not to give you feedback on how you are doing (if the documentation is completely useless, sure).
But anyways, I am here to show some interesting examples that I saw recently:
- Trickery
Deception is the word. The designer here is mimicking the pop-up windows that appear in MacOS. There are so many of them that come up in various scenarios in the OS that we just Allow because of the trust we have in Apple. Tricking users is into clicking “Allow” perhaps is not the answer.
2. Humor
The creator here is trying to bring some humor to this irritating experience and being transparent about how they are going to use a user’s email address. Is being transparent enough to get a sign-up?
3. Confession
They agree that popups are horrible but give one anyway.
4. What about Honesty?
5. Or Transparency?
Irrespective of what kind of pop-ups we see on the internet, we have developed an interesting behavior — Close them. We search for the close button as soon as we see them. We don’t want to read them. That’s probably because of the over usage and abuse of pop-ups. Having them in some corner of a website is not the answer always, as they are ignored too.
