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Do you like online pop-ups? Of course you don’t. Who wants to be constantly interrupted. Opening a website in the UK means facing an onslaught of pop-ups asking you to agree to cookies, sign up to a mailing list and chat with a chatbot. Some videos will start playing automatically, playing music and slowing down the site.
Pop-ups are the opposite of good user experience (user experience in technical parlance). Not only are they annoying, they are often manipulative. Make it intentionally difficult to close them. Sometimes, opting out of anything they push requires clicking through to a new website. Once you see hundreds of these notifications, you’re less likely to read what they say and more likely to try to find a way to get rid of them as quickly as possible—even if it means giving up your privacy.
At the heart of these horrific design choices lies the multi-billion dollar digital advertising sector – still the default method of supporting online content. Pop-ups are created to please advertisers.
Earlier this year, I interviewed their inventor. Ethan Zuckerman is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. But in the late 1990s, he was part of the founding team of Tripod.com. Tripod hosts user-generated content that is supported by advertising. The problem is that advertisers are sometimes nervous about placing ads next to potentially conflicting content. The solution Zuckerman came up with was to separate the two into separate windows so that the ads could appear in front of the page rather than directly on it. “Your homepage is in one window and your ads are in another window,” he said. “Everyone will be happy. Spoiler alert, no one is happy.”
From an advertiser’s perspective, this is a genius move. Their advertising became more visible. Internet users hate them. This difference of opinion can be applied to website design as a whole. Ugly, cluttered pages are often the result of ad crawling. A clean, easy-to-use website doesn’t have the same appeal to advertisers, nor does it contain text that search engine algorithms love.
Even after browsers introduced the ability to automatically block pop-up ads, pop-ups continued to proliferate. This is because they are not always separate windows, but overlap with the window you are viewing.
My least favorite was the popping cookie. Cookies are pieces of code that allow websites to track you online and collect data. They’re the basis for personalized advertising—which is why you tend to see ads for things you just bought. If you allow them, they will follow you everywhere, monitoring the websites you visit, the products you purchase, your IP address and your geographical location.
In recent years, there has been a pushback against this intrusive tracking. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, also known as GDPR, requires companies to tell internet users when they are being tracked and give them a chance to opt out. For some reason, companies decided that the best way to do this was to use pop-ups. Most are designed in a way that makes it easy for people to accept being tracked, but time-consuming to opt out.
Last month, the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Competition and Markets Authority said they would look into the design of website, including pop-ups, to see if they have a negative impact. A total ban seems unlikely. Before you read the idea of an ICO, you need to click “Agree” in the cookie box that pops up first.
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