Billboards in Japan

Typical popup mistakes

What do you do, when you see a popup window on your screen?

I am just closing it without reading.

Why?

It is called - Banner Blindness.

I am talking here about all flashy things on the screen – dialog boxes, popups, carousels, banners, gifs, animations you name it. 

Nielsen Norman group article gives one of the best definitions of what it is:

- "It describes people’s tendency to ignore page elements that they perceive (correctly or incorrectly) to be ads. Instead, people direct attention only to a subset of the stimuli in the environment – usually related to their goals."

This is why I close popups without looking at them.

Let's look at some real life example:

Last week I was analysing top online stores in Latvia. The “winner” had FIVE flashy things, yes, I counted five different flashy things on the first desktop screen:

  1. Free shipping advertisement (in red background) above the navigation.
  2. Companies logo as a gif with present boxes appearing and fading.
  3. Carousel with changing slides in prime location (again mainly in bold background colours).
  4. Time countdown till the end of promotion campaign.
  5. Another carousel instantly below the prime location carousel, with tons of logos in it.

This left me thinking: What do you want me to do as a customer? What do you want to me focus on? Is it 1st, 2nd or maybe 5th place? As a human being I cannot concentrate on all 5. Even knowing psychology behind I felt overwhelmed.

Some tips on what not to do:

#1: Never overlay popup banners simultaneously. If you want several ones (not advised), do one by one and with some time intervals. Prioritise the most important one like cookie policy, have some time interval and then push next one.

#2: Do not push popup window, like “Subscribe to our newsletter” before page has loaded and customer has done first interaction. Why? Imagine, I am seeing the store for the first time, I don’t have idea of what the store is selling or doing. 

#3: Do not push popup window for “Feedback”, after customer has done some interaction with the page. I have seen this mistake so many times. For example, as a new customer just entered online store and a feedback window appears. Why? I have no opinion about the store jet, so I just get annoyed and surely, I am not giving any feedback. Be cautious about popup window timings, in this feedback example, you can have much better outcome by asking for it in the right time to the right people. 

These 3 tips are not covering all popup window mistakes and are NOT a rocket science. I believe many of you though, oh, but this is just logical. Yes, it is, but there are still many shops that are missing out opportunities just because they did not thought of these rather simple things. 

P.S. If you are more interested in Banner Blindness read more on Nielsen Norman Group’s webpage: https://www.nngroup.com/search/?q=banner+blindness