A Very Annoying Trend: Transparent Popovers
January 4, 2010
Because broken pages suck, and misalignment sucks.
Little is more annoying to any site member than popups. In that small group of things that are actually more annoying are transparent popovers. I don’t know exactly how these became popular. I’m considering blaming Facebook. Why in the world any site that isn’t Facebook is using them is beyond me. Maybe they don’t read enough of Facebook users’ complaints about the popovers not loading properly, and begging them to go back to navigating to an actual webpage when you click something.
No, instead, a something that would be a popup but isn’t quite, appears in a little square, with the rest of the window grayed out. You type things into it that are supposed to get sent to the site. When you’re done, it’s supposed to disappear, or show an X somewhere so you can close the darned thing, and return to the page you were at.
Instead, things don’t quite work out this way, but you have no recourse with a back button. If what was supposed to happen, didn’t, you have to do it five times to figure that out.
Then you need to send feedback, and guess what? The feedback form is also in a popover, and your report that there is a problem also may or may not get there.
Heck, whether you’re using IE or Firefox, the popover might not even load. You get a gray box error that says some obscure hieroglyphic java something or other doesn’t exist. How do you get it to work? Who knows? Who cares?
Obviously the people who run these sites don’t care about their users…just about having whatever’s supposedly the latest thing. Well this thing has rendered a few websites that I used to like, dead to me.
Recent Comments