From conducting decades of user research, we know that people dislike popups and modals. I was reminded of this fact during a recent usability study. While attempting to complete a task, a participant tossed his phone across the table after encountering multiple popups, consecutively. Frustrated, he abandoned his task and left the website with a very bad impression of the organization. Several other users shared a similar sentiment, albeit they did not throw their phones.
A popup (also known as an overlay or popover ) is a window or dialog that appears on top of the page content. A popup can be classified according to two dimensions:
Adobe Analytics' data from "Cyber Monday" in 2017 is based on an analysis of one trillion visits to over 4,500 ecommerce sites. Desktop computers now only account for slightly more than half of visits to ecommerce sites, but the sites got dramatically less revenue from visitors on mobile devices
After I had selected a handful of sofa styles I was interested in, I was ready to see how they might look in a real space. Joybird used photos from actual customers posted on social channels to show the versatility of the products and how these different sectional configurations might work in the
The OECD project looked at a broad range of job-related skills, but of most interest to us is the test of technology skills. For this part of the study, participants were asked to perform 14 computer-based tasks. Instead of using live websites, the participants attempted the tasks on simulated
10 Years After Bitcoin Began, are We Underestimating Crypto?
Many write off cryptocurrency adoption as part of a self-fulfilling ecosystem that doesn’t impact people outside of enthusiasts and speculators. In earlier years, that could have been argued. Today, I think you would have difficulty making that case. Why? Because technology titans across multiple
Emerging Technologies are Banding Together to Accelerate Big Data’s Growth
Thanks to the growth of the internet, the rate at which new information is being released is growing exponentially. Accelerating big data between machines. We are in an age when communication is not just between human beings. Machines are now the go-to for connections between the people to people
Decentralized P2P Lending Services vs Networks
There can be an arbitrary number of currency networks within the Trustlines Network ecosystem, using a related Currency Network Token Factory smart contract. Thus, there is no single “Trustlines token,” but instead an arbitrary number of coexisting currencies that share only the
User Need Statements
First time practitioners are often apprehensive to include anything that is not a verbatim finding from research in their need statements. However, it is important to remember that our users will not always directly say or even know precisely what they specifically need or why. Instead, it is our
popups: 10 problematic trends and alternatives
Marking Required Fields in Forms
Not necessarily, but red has become the expected required-marker color on the web, which is a reason in its own right to stick with this choice (according to Jakob’s Law). In any case, there is some value to using different colors for the asterisk and for the field label: it allows users to
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
Why are we willing to sleep in strangers’ beds, or conversely, let strangers into our homes? We do so because Airbnb has established a trusted, secure, and easy to use customer experience. Similar to Rent the Runway, Airbnb is a player in the growing “sharing” economy. The peer-to-peer online
OK-Cancel or Cancel-OK? The Trouble With Buttons
We get countless questions about small details in UI design that don't matter much to the overall user experience. One classic is the order of buttons in dialog boxes: OK / Cancel Cancel / OK Both are reasonable choices, and people can argue for hours about their preferences: Listing OK
Best Application Designs
Several applications, however, enhanced an old idea: the tooltip. These "super" tooltips stretch far beyond their original intent and thus earned the spot as the year's most improved interaction design technique. Emerging in the 1990s, tooltips (or "bubble help") started off by providing small
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
Why are we willing to sleep in strangers’ beds, or conversely, let strangers into our homes? We do so because Airbnb has established a trusted, secure, and easy to use customer experience. Similar to Rent the Runway, Airbnb is a player in the growing “sharing” economy. The peer-to-peer online
WP Engine Culture Recognized at Greater Austin Business Awards
The annual Greater Austin Business Awards competition, presented by The Austin Chamber of Commerce, is designed to honor excellence in all aspects of business. In order to promote awareness and perpetuate good practices, the Awards recognize companies and organization in the Austin region for
popups: 10 problematic trends and alternatives
A Look Back at the 2018 WP Engine Summit
To conclude the Summit, we heard from WP Engine leaders who offered a look into the WP Engine roadmap. This included a look at newly released products, like our Global Edge Security offering in partnership with Cloudflare, as well as a deep-dive into our recent acquisition of StudioPress. To wrap
How to Try Gutenberg Safely in a Sandbox Environment .
If you encounter issues with your own custom plugins or custom theme, and are worried that Gutenberg might be released before these can be updated for compatibility, not to worry! Installing the Classic Editor plugin is a safe and easy way to ensure you can continue using the standard WordPress
Tooltip Guidelines
The Business Insider website used tooltips for 2 of 3 icons in its navigation menu. (Note: on the homepage of the Business Insider website, the globe icon did have a tooltip that read Globe Icon. However, the label was not helpful, nor indicative of its functionality: a language selector.) In
UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet
Designing and developing a product often involves a large team of people with different backgrounds and experiences who must be on the same page about the project goals, the user needs and behaviors, and even the component processes involved. This common understanding is often built with
Service Design 101
Imagine a restaurant where there are a range employees: hosts, servers, busboys, and chefs. Service design focuses on how the restaurant operates and delivers the food it promises—from sourcing and receiving ingredients, to on-boarding new chefs, to server-chef communication regarding a diner’s
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Melissa Hathaway came across our radar recently when President Obama tasked the former Bush administration aide with leading a 60-day review of Bush’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative; a largely classified, purported $30 billion, multi phase plan to address cybersecurity issues
Hackers are Ready to Exploit Zero-Day Flaws; Companies are Slow to Act
Even devices with existing security systems can fall prey especially if users or administrators aren’t aware of the exploits or fail to apply stop-gap measures to prevent attacks. While not technically in its zero-day period during the Equifax breach, the event illustrates how slow reaction
Evaluating Popular Web Browsers in Terms of Security and Privacy
The recent update by Apple has really up the game for Safari in terms of privacy. Features like camouflaging from digital fingerprinting; intelligent tracking protection and an array of useful add-ons are introduced to enhance user’s online privacy. Safari recently discontinued the use of “Do
4 Painless Ways to Pay off Small Business Loans Early
Paying back small business loans (SBL) has become a nightmare for so many entrepreneurs in this millennial age. The research by Main Street Lender on over 10,000 business loan applicants in the U.S disclosed that about 64 percent of applicants were unable to secure any type of financing. About 82
popups: 10 problematic trends and alternatives
RW Q&A: Monisha Perkash, founder of Lumo Bodytech
Lumo’s wearable products are characteristically small with intelligent sensors. Perkash described the Lumo Lift, a small lapel pin that attaches to your shirt with magnets, and the Lumo Run, a tiny clip that could be attached to the waistband of your shorts. “When you slouch, the Lumo Lift
Meet Meural, Fine Art on My Walls at Home
If you were one of those kids who “became a person” in the age of the rotating family pictures inside a frame on an end table–you will relate to this feeling. Remember the real trick to these abominations was to come in the door from school and toss your bookbag in front of it quickly
Popups: 10 Problematic Trends and Alternatives | University Websites: Top 10 Design Guidelines
University Websites: Top 10 Design Guidelines
Contrary to what you may think, teenagers and college-aged students don’t always appreciate a hip language or interaction. Students are conscious of the high costs of education; many will go into debt. They take that very seriously, and they want you to do the same. Using clever labels or flashy
100 Million Websites
When designing a website, comply with users' expectations. In a mature system, differentiation doesn't come from a contrarian user interface. Such interfaces serve only to chase users away from a site. The Web is no longer a marvel of innovation, it's an everyday tool, and you differentiate
Usability Testing of Advanced Homepage Concepts (by Jakob Nielsen)
Almost all users disliked the scrolling tickers (marquees) in some of the prototypes. Users complained that they were hard to read and time-consuming to interpret. One user kept missing the beginning of the text and thus had difficulty understanding what the message was about. One user said that he
