Designed Annoyance

Pop ups; one of the great annoyances of the Internet age. A design annoyance that turns off many consumers, yet somehow not everyone has got the message. In the “tab” era pop ups are increasingly unwelcome, opening a new browser session when the user no longer wants multiple windows but rather opting for tabbed browsing instead. I see plenty of design portfolios even still make use of pop ups to display their work, having users land on a splash page (also an annoyance) and then forcing them to open a new window. You’d imagine the advent of pop up blockers would have given people the hint by now, but not so much it seems.

Link pop ups are an ever increasing annoyance too, the kind where you accidentally hover over the link embedded in an article when scrolling past it and a window pops up displaying an ad or a message telling you how popular the link is. Not only is this unnecessary, it’s largely unwelcome and intrusive. But don’t take my word for it, listen to Mr. Usability himself.

One of misery designs most insidious recent examples is the idea of embedding links to advertising on the actual words of an article using a service like IntelliTxt. By sullying the very concept of navigation, such ads not only damage the user experience on the host site, they poison the well for all websites. Such links make users even less likely to navigate sites, and more likely to turn to trusted search engines to guide them to the next page.

Like much Web advertising, embedded ad links rely on interruption marketing, intruding as much as possible on users and preventing them from doing what they want to do.

- Jakob Nielsen web usability expert

So what annoys you about websites?

Written by John Leschinski from Leschinski Design
Posted on August 18th, 2007 and filed under Design & Coding
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