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Don't Let Presentation Distract from Information
Back in the day, in the late '90s, when I started designing web sites, I learned very quickly not to let the presentation get in the way of the information.
That simple concept has served me well, I think, even in this day of annoying popups, ads and surveys as soon as you land on a page you think has the information you want.
Can anything be more annoying than that?
Amusingly, the birth of popups also birthed a sector within the cyber security industry -- the popup blockers you can buy for your web browser or are included in all web browsers now.
Don't let your desire to sell someone something, or collect their information, or solicit their opinion, obscure the reason that person clicked on that page in the first place.
I repeatedly land on pages and start to read the information I searched for, only to be rudely interrupted by a popup asking me to rate the page or product or service before I've even had a chance to learn about the page or product or service.
Or, I land on a page and before I even see the information, I am jarred by an ad, a coupon, or a request for my information that completely covers up what I wanted to read.
To make matters worse, especially on mobile devices, attempts to click the offending intrusions off of my screen bounce me off the page I wanted to see and on to another, irrelevant page.
Apparently, and unfortunately, this annoying practice works to some degree. A study of 1.75 billion popups by Sumo, which offers apps to automate website growth, showed a 3.1 percent conversion rate. That's not great, but if done properly, that same study showed popups can result in conversion rates of 9.28 percent.
Note "done properly", meaning don't let the presentation get in the way of the information! That study confirmed that popups that appear almost immediately convert at a much lower rate than those that wait for at least 15 seconds.
So, despite how annoying popups are, and how much we all loathe them, they can convert into sales.
If you want to use them on your site, go for it, but remember Information still reigns supreme on the Internet. That's why it's called the Information Superhighway, and not the Popup Superhighway or Presentation Superhighway.
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