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Alternative to videolightbox4/1/2023 They also often have lengthy animations that gets in the way of a workflow. I find the popularity of these implementations quite disconcerting and a step back from trying to have the user feel in control. In summary, lightboxes represent a poor re-invention the dialog box with no advantage and new improved disadvantages. Besides, new windows are modeless, so they’re for a different situation than the modal lightboxes we’re talking about here. Lightboxes don’t look like popup windows, so they used to be a way to get around users dismissing new windows as advertisements, but now advertisers are using lightbox-like elements, so that advantage is fading if not already loss. If you disable the Back button, users may take it to mean the lightbox content is opened in a new tab or window, so they click the window/tab Close button to go back, blowing away the underlying page, its history, and maybe the entire browser session. But instead, clicking Back moves the underlying page back, forcing the user to go forward and re-set everything up. If you leave the Back button enabled, users may click it intending to back out of the lightbox to return to the underlying page (or to move back a page within the lightbox such as when viewing a slide show). Now we add closing the lightbox, with its own idiosyncratic controls. The user may need to use the Back button, or close the current window, or close the current tab. It’s bad enough that there are three inconsistent ways of dismissing some content in order to return to previous content. ![]() If you need context from the previous page, copy the appropriate content to the new page.Ĭompared to a new page, lightboxes add mental workload, forcing the user to learn and remember yet another way of navigating. Nielsen may talk about how well a lightbox captures user attention, but it can’t compete with presenting the user an entirely new page. Like a modal dialog box, when the user moves to a new page, the user is forced either to complete what’s necessary or to cancel (via Back). If you need something modal in a web site, move to a new page. Even if a lightbox were movable, you wouldn’t be able to move it outside the window frame so it is always occluding something. The lightboxes I’ve seen can’t be moved, so the user can’t see all that’s behind for reference. Assuming it’s actually a good idea to force the users to do something (and usually it isn’t), this forgets that dialog boxes have a major advantage over lightboxes: they’re fully moveable. People have compared lightboxes to modal dialog boxes, which force the user to complete or cancel an act before proceeding, while still allowing users to see the previous content for reference. I’ve no data other than some personal observations, but analytically modal lightboxes have such major usability problems compared the alternative that I can’t imagine what they’d be good for. Neat, direct, obvious what was happening. I thought it worked quite well - you select additional options on the page for adding things like breakdown cover to the base policy, click update, and the lightbox faded in and showed the progress of the update. I saw an interesting use of a lightbox the other day, shopping for car insurance. So, has anyone done any user testing/usability tests with lightbox UIs, and how did they perform? What are the pitfalls? Where do they do well? Where do they do poorly? Have you been lightboxed lately? (discussion ![]() There seems to be a bit of a resistance by some well known web software developers: However, they often don't allow the user to open images or perform that task in a new browser tab, for example, which can frustrate many. They do make it very obvious what is going on, and where the user's focus is to be at any one point in the experience. You know the drill - click on a link, the background fades darker, and up pops a UI for interacting with an object, making a change, viewing a picture gallery etc. ![]() Lightbox UIs are becoming a lot more prevalent in mainstream web-design.
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