As if ads were bad enough, we have to deal with online solicitations in the form of dialog box interrupters. Notice that the one screenshot below is a page about stress reduction.
You can make matters even worse by paywalling basic, interchangeable content about something—a book, in the National Geographic example—that could easily be found on a less annoying website.
It’s not one or two interrupter modals that are the problem, it’s the compounding of them over a stretch of time where a user is engaged with a machine. It increases what UX designers (and psychologist in general) call “cognitive load.” The energy spent dealing with so many interruptions is at the cost of normal browsing behavior. Users will tire more quickly than without these things popping up. I sure did, hence this post.
4 Comments
What really bothers me most is that the people who run these sites KNOW that we hate these intrusions. For sites I visit often, I use the built-in blocking function of uBlock to turn them off permanently.
Those modals aren’t ads, technically, though sometimes they would appear ad-like to uBlock, depending on what kind of content the software is looking for. Does uBlock block programmatic modals, like the ones I screenshotted?
No, the way uBlock works is that you identify any element on the page and block it. It takes the modals as just another element. It blocks ads by source, and adds a little heuristics to refine the process. Everything else is the user adding filters.
That’s pretty fascinating to me, that it can use your input to block specific elements. Never heard of a plugin doing that. You have to think of how much demand there is out there for developers to make something to meet it (probably a lot of demand…modals are quite annoying).