SIGIA-L Mail Archives: SIGIA-L: How users react to pop-up windo
SIGIA-L: How users react to pop-up windows
From: paula.thornton_at_luminant.com
Date: Thu Feb 08 2001 - 13:08:49 EST
A loud voice booms: "Step away from the Internet and put your hands up
over your head."
While there is no debating the kind of testing results where every
participant closed the pop-up, we need to avoid broad generalizations. If
you'll recall in that situation, people were on a "mission" and the pop-up
was perceived as "interruptive". What if the design was an application,
where a particular side task (a calculator would be a very simplistic
example) was imperative to the process, but didn't fit well in the main
interface? I actually had a situation like this at a client site, where
the main interface relied so heavily on a large graphic display that there
visually was not enough room in that "plane" to add the side task. We do
what naturally occurs at our desk, we stack tasks. A pop-up is a way to
accomplish this in 2-dimensional space.
It's just a matter of setting and fulfilling expectations. If the pop-up
enhances the process, then it adds value. If the user is unaware of the
purpose of the pop-up they have no way to assess its value and they assume
"no value" and shut it down as soon as possible.
Paula Thornton
Senior Consultant / Information Architect
Luminant Worldwide, Dallas
888-388-5023
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2
: Sun Nov 23 2003 - 22:54:31 EST
|
