Lightboxes are good. When you want a full view of an image when you click on a thumbnail, or you click on something for additional details as they keep one on the same page without any hassles of clicking the back button or closing a pop-up window. I either ways prefer pop-up windows (only when I intend to open them), sine I find myself working much faster with new tabs, but I am taking the general viewpoint here, of a much wider user base. I agree that most of the people would find the lightbox method much more comfortable. However, when I don’t intend to open a lightbox, please don’t. It is irritating, obstructive and in many cases makes a website look like a website from 1995 offering a free PC Virus scan.
Some website show auto lightboxes when a user is redirected to a site from a Google web search. Here’s an example:
If you visit daniweb.com by typing it in your address bar, you won’t see it. Follow a google url and you will see it. When I see such a lightbox, I don’t feel like joining your ‘network’. I go back to my search results and select a different link.
Another annoying example of such auto-lightboxes is the one filled with ‘Tweet about me‘, ‘Like ME‘ widgets. I understand that your daddy issues resulting in attention-seeking behavior need to be tended, but an explicit (as explicit as literally begging others to ‘Like’ you) and desperate attempt at the same needs to be addressed, and not tended.
I also hate those little bars you have at the bottom of your pages. They are ugly, and make me claustrophobic. Facebook started it all and it was a good feature, and it still is. But it is apt for facebook. It allows the user to interact with other users and perform a lot of tasks which are the primary focus of the website. As for others:
I have nothing to add. As for my reasons as to why I hate these boxes:
- I do a lot of browsing from my mobile phone using the Opera Mini browser. The thing with Opera mini is that it attempts and does a very good of job of rendering websites meant for desktop browsers and not only the one for mobile browsers. It handles scripting also in a very creative manner. The scripts are handled on a proxy server (maintained by Opera) side and any triggered event causes the page to reload with a state in which the event has triggered. Hence any changes in the web page owing to script execution causes a page reload and occurs on a remote server and it sucks to have to do that just to close a big damn box. Furthermore sometimes the boxes are so huge, that in an attempt by Opera to place the layout properly, I am never able to get to the close button. The crappy bottom bar takes up 50-60% of the browser viewport on mobile devices. And due to the small width of the same, the crappy bar is never visible anyways.
- A very specific reference to a very specific browser on a somewhat specific platform may not give one the reason enough to hear my proposal. My other reason is that these lightboxes break the very fabric of web browsing. These lightboxes sometimes have stateful information in it and are like a web frame (developers read: iframe) in themselves. But there is no reload, no back/forward buttons. For quite a few cases it is highly desirable to atleast have a reload feature, but my only option to close the damn lightbox with a button in some place hidden by your awesome navigation research in the realm of Web 2.0.
- A Lightbox focuses ones attention to the point the website is not about: Unless ofcourse your intention is to introduce me to single women. And your ‘Social Networking integration’ lightboxes would have got swirlies in high school. And they literally focus ones attention by blacking out the rest of the page or some similar gimmick.
- The timespan of a user visit on a page is very very small. Especially if he/she comes redirected from a web search. I remember reading a blog post which said that Google tries to keep it’s interface very simple and compresses it’s HTML (to that point that a company so into standards sends an HTML file without a DOCTYPE) because they found that for a delay of every second in loading the page, the number of users who exited the search doubled.
- They are seriously, seriously, annoying.
So, if you are a user, please leave a comment below signing up for the cause and if you’re a developer and agree with me, then make a difference. If you don’t, I would love to listen to your side of the story.
Absolutely. I hate that crap.
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I hate them too. And I hate the way they try hide the close button. If I get a popup like these I usually go back to the search results and pick a different link. Sites that use this for advertising to force me to search the ad for the close button are just asking me to go away and I do. These lightboxes are very irritating.
I had a vaguely similar thought not long ago, and it was interesting to read a similar experience (although, I’ve never been able to find mobile browsing even a little usable personally, so I can’t think of a +1/-1 there).
About the Facebook’s social-integrated web features, I like it from a business/analytics POV, if not personally. I do not use any of those, however.
Down with modality.
i HATE the lightbox. it’s not good for anything. i don’t care what anyone says. not even gonna waste time explaining why it sucks, just like i won’t bother to explain why an asian booty contest sucks. DEATH TO THE LIGHTBOX!
I sign this petition! They an ugly, lazy piece of UI that degrade the user-experience.
You nailed it. I got out of web dev 10 years ago, so I’m totally out of touch with what these new elements are called.
For one, thanks for the education. What I’ve been referring to as “brownout” or “power failure mode” is apparently a lightbox. I still know crappy web design when it renders before me, and lightboxes seem to be one of the worst bits of it out there.
I’d been referring to them as “power failure mode” because it looks like it’s the limited night menu- all they can manage while they are in crisis. Now that I’ve read your page, I think you found a better comparison. Lightboxes really are just the spam popups of the new web age.
As for a practical fix- anyone know of a browser plugin or custom CSS that would block out lightboxes?
I have never used Lightbox before, but am experimenting with showcasing a specific video on a blog post: http://rmhines.com/?p=1332
The video “NightFall” is extremely well done, and I feel like it deserves that kind of special attention for an overlay. I would make it clear that it’s a “pop up” and there is an X in the lower right corner to exit. I test the page on my iPhone’s Safari browser it was still user-friendly.
What do you all think?
I think you should go back to art school, and leave this to the professionals.
Lightbox is ruining my web experience, also. When it works, it’s acceptable, when it doesn’t, it makes me wanna rage.
Sometimes images just won’t load in Lightbox. Then I go back to the page, right click the thumbnail and open the link in a new window. BAM! The image loads instantly and I also notice it’s a hotlink. Why would Lightbox be unable to load a fucking image? WHY?
Then there’s the crappy animations – I hate them, I don’t need them, I want the image and I want it NOW. I also don’t want large images to load in the middle of the browser window, just load it in a new tab where I can see it zoomed out in its entirety, goddammit!
When an image opens in a new tab, especially when the internet connection is shitty or when the server is slow, the browser tells me whatever I need to know. Is the image there? Has the browser connected to the server? Is the image there? What is the image URL? How much of the image has been loaded? Lightbox just shows me the spinning gif, and I have no idea what happens in the background.
This entire concept of “here’s the image in the same browser window so that you’ll be able to return to the site as soon as you close the lightbox” is stupid and does exactly the opposite. And when it doesn’t work, it drives the user crazy. Especially the people who know about the magic and simplicity of static hotlinking.
Javascript has its place, but please stop forcing it down everyone’s throat. There are perfect use cases for HTML only anchors and images, there’s absolutely no need to use Lightbox to show a couple of low resolution screenshots from an upcoming game, you fucking payola “game journalism” site.
I hate lightboxes with a passion. Much like popups ten years ago, they’re a software feature that once had a genuine and beneficial purpose. E.g., they were useful for a user-initiated actions like zooming in on a thumbnail of a photograph. However, again like popups, that once-useful purpose has long since been completely usurped to the point that developers have now actually created add-ons for most browsers that allow users to completely disable lightbox functionality (e.g., https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/stoppity-poppity/).
I have a theory that this sort of abuse of once-useful features comes about when greedy marketing types (or their hippy counterparts, those equally-useless and egotistical so-called “UX Designer” characters that have appeared in recent years) get involved in the business of software development. They see something like popups or lightboxes used in their intended context when they’re browsing the web, and a little lightbulb immediately goes on over their heads as they think, “Hey!, I could use that for my own underhanded purposes, as a form of interrupt marketing!!” It doesn’t seem to occur to them even for a second that users are sophisticated enough to get pissed off when you abuse their trust by inviting them onto your website with the promise of one type of content, then play bait and switch with the content they agreed to be exposed to. These idiots simply aren’t smart enough to realise that users and developers can and will deal with any greedy egotists that try to pull those sort of cheap marketing tricks for their own selfish ends. Real software developers never pull these sort of stunts – we’re bright enough to realise that they’re self-defeating. It’s always people that don’t code themselves, but who nonetheless have convinced those paying the bills that they can increase revenues simply by annoying users more, that try this sort of thing on.
I’ve actually sat in meetings and listened to these idiots saying things like “popups work – *because* they’re annoying”. This is announcement is generally accompanied by a stupid, smug grin on their face that implies they think they’ve just revealed some hidden and arcane knowledge. They honestly believe this obviously-delusional garbage. They think that popups, lightboxes and in-your-face Javascript that places toolbars at the bottom of every page and/or that pops a message to ask “if you’re really sure you want to leave this site” when you go to exit a page are simply fabulous ways to communicate with prospective customers. They’re responsible for those distracting slide-in animations that appear and obscure the bottom of an article just as users are trying to scroll through and absorb same. They are the ‘brains’ behind those adverts for smart phone “apps” that appear within seconds of someone with a fully-functional smart phone browser being misguided enough to try and visit a website. (Newspapers are particularly guilty of this design sin: this just in, chaps – no-one in the entire history of the internet has *ever* been interested in “downloading your app” *just to visit a fucking website*. I think you might have misunderstood what an app is if you think it’s merely your content + your adverts in a medium you get to fully control. I realise that coming from a newsprint background it may have come as something of a culture shock to you when then internet came along and you no longer had control over the means of distribution for your news, but come on you’ve had twenty fucking years to get used to the concept and you still don’t seem to get it.)
These days, I stick to fighting the good fight where I can. I’m an independent software developer, and as such I regularly advise clients on what actually works based on what lowbrow tricks annoy me and what I’ve read other internet users bitching about online. When customers listen to me, then I’m generally able to help them achieve a lot and gain a wide following of loyal and happy customers, by creating websites that users actually *want* to visit (as opposed to actively trying to “annoy” users into compliance). When instead customers want me to meet their “UX Expert” friend (that in reality is usually some art school dropout with even less of a clue about personal hygiene and fashion sense than they do about technology), I generally leave them to the lightboxes, smart phone “apps”, topheavy javascript, and other miscellaneous attempts to “beneficially annoy” users that they are convinced works.
Wow! Thank you for the descriptive comment and adding another perspective on why lightboxes even exist. I apologize for taking such a long time in approving the comment.