pop-up
Overlay Off
I asked a question on twitter earlier today.
I received some interesting replies which I thought I might collate and share.
I found it interesting to see how much people disliked the overlay effect which is becoming increasingly popular due to sites like facebook popularising lightboxes. This is essentially websites, and RIAs in particular going back to the bad ol’ days of desktop application design. In such archaeic times dialog boxes which prevented the user from doing any other action until the dialog has been dismissed were common. Alas they’re still relatively common for some types of applications in some operating systems (not naming names of course).
I had believed that in certain process or stepped tasks the overlay or the lightbox was a useful tool which focuses the attention and restricts the user to more limited courses of action which is useful for keeping a process in line. But I would think again having seen some of these reactions. Has anybody experience of doing user testing with these sorts of interfaces.
