Pop-ups are often considered as an intrusive website element, but it is a good way to attract the attention of our readers. When we develop a website, pop-up messages could be used to notify users about important features, such as encouraging them to subscribe with the website. However, some web developers may use this feature excessively, causing a significant drop in user experience. We shouldn’t cause the target audience to get annoyed and leave our website immediately. There are different strategies that we can use to keep pop-up messages interesting.
In general, we should use a simple pop-up and it is a bad idea to use more than one pop-up in our website. The pop-up message can be displayed at the main page. It is also important to make sure that the pop-up message isn’t too long. As an example, we may only ask them to fill their email address and name.
It is not a good idea to put a lengthy web form and ask our visitors to fill all details. If we do this, they will simply close our pop-up. An ideal design for pop-up message includes corporate logo, name field, email field, subscribe button and “No Thanks” button. It means that users should have an option to immediately close the pop if they want it. The Close or No Thanks button should be displayed prominently. Our main purpose is to get users get more comfortable in our website and it is not a good idea to annoy them with an elusive pop-up message that has no clear way to close it.
In fact, if users can’t find the close button for the pop-up, they will leave our website entirely by closing the browser tab. This isn’t something that we want to achieve. At first, our audience want to check our content and not to subscribe to our newsletter, so we shouldn’t intrusively tell them to do that.
Some web developers use pop-up messages intrusively enough that they put them on virtually every page. This is comparable to a digital suicide and people will leave after visiting two or three pages. Another option is to include a checkbox that allows users to not see the pop-up again when they re-visit our website in the future. If they do this, they actually have a slight commitment to visit our website again. If our readers don’t want to see the pop-up, we shouldn’t compel them to do this. In fact, there are many popup blockers out there and users can simply enable the software.
Another ridiculous way of using pop-up is by using it as an entry point. This could happen when the website owner is desperate to tell visitors to subscribe to their newsletters, before they can go any further. Internet users are not stupid and if we do this, they will never return to our website. We also shouldn’t use audio effects and flash animation, because this could make the situation to get worse.