You can’t read news articles in peace anymore. Nowadays, one in two websites is going to throw a newsletter sign-up module at you before you even start reading the first paragraph— want access to this article that you find so interesting? Sign up here first, just a matter of seconds! If you are on mobile, you are likely to tap on the wrong spot, and be redirected somewhere else, and it’s so much fun…

Marketing experts are getting creative at finding new ways of luring us into giving away our email addresses. The strategies they experiment with are just short of grotesque, but we are supposed to take all them as normal. Low-quality content with sensational titles to bait users to click, content split into multiple pages to get more exposure on search engines, and lots of advertising that makes web pages incredibly heavy can make surfing the Internet a painful experience. Now we are witnessing a comeback of pop-ups in the form of modal overlays that cannot be blocked by browsers. It looks like we are back to the old days, when you had to skip that obnoxious splash screen created by the occasional designer in order to access some content. The real-world equivalent would be someone stopping right in front of you while you are walking down the street — every time you go out. How would that feel?

A few months ago I wrote an article called the tyranny of testing over design. One of the points I made is that design should not be driven by impersonal, aseptic statistics, when well-founded best practices and simple common sense lead in the opposite direction. First and foremost, design should be friendly to humans, and design decisions should be based on what we already know about them. We have plenty of evidence-based research data on what people like, and what they find intuitive and helpful. We also know what they find annoying, time-consuming, and unnecessarily distracting. It’s surprising that in 2016 there’s still a need to quote out loud a famous article by Jakob Nielsen, a well-known authority in web usability, about the Top 10 mistakes in web design (check point 7).

This sudden rush into anti-usability patterns, such as newsletter or survey pop-ups, is likely more of a marketing fad than an evidence-based, solidly proven strategy. The statistics showing an increase in conversion don’t take into account the hidden costs (for more on this, check the article by Meyer/Flaherty mentioned in the recommended links below). And even if begging for the user’s attention was supported by numbers, it would still be against common sense, and the respect that we owe to other people. We can’t all ignore what an appropriate behaviour is, and turn into ill-mannered content creators, just because the numbers say that it’s OK to do so. You don’t bombard people with emails. You don’t ask people to sign contracts that are against their own interest. You don’t block people in the street to advertise your product. You don’t throw pop-ups in your reader’s face.

The web is a formidable repository of shared knowledge. We can’t succumb to those who believe that the Internet should be dominated by the rules of marketing. We can’t accept to have people who lack creative thinking as team leaders and decision-makers. Designers, developers and content creators should not allow the work that they do to be polluted by dark patterns, poor taste, and stupid cookie consent banners that bureaucrats with no understanding of the real world have imposed on us.

I’d like to end this with a great discovery that I made today. It’s an article published in 2004 on DZ Net. I am not going to include a link, though, just a screenshot. At least I will spare you their brand new survey pop-up. As you can see, these guys are the best — they really managed to outdo themselves!

The next time that you are annoyed by some sort of pop-up, leave the site immediately, if it’s not too much of a sacrifice, or try to be creative: