Lightbox fatigue
Jacob Nielsen just proclaimed the lightbox the “interaction design technique of the year“:
In UI terms, a lightbox draws the user’s attention to a dialog box, error message, or other design element in the middle of the screen by dimming the rest of the screen.
Yes, the lightbox has some benefits. It shows you an Important Message within the context of the page you were just looking at. It doesn’t get blocked by popup killers. And it looks super-cool, especially when used as a slideshow.
But lightboxes are starting to crop up everywhere. In my Yahoo mail (I hope the developer got paid a lot for that), in half the applications I interact with, even in my own website (OK, I put it there, but that was 2 years ago when it was very cool and cutting edge).
Is anyone else starting to suffer from lightbox fatigue?
YES.
Some of them I like and find quite helpful.
But the ones commonly used for showing photos, where it makes a big deal of resizing the box to the shape of the photograph as it loads each one, and does fading, etc. DRIVE ME NUTS. Just takes so long when all I want is to see the darn image.
Sigh. That rant felt good. Thanks
I just used a lightbox technique (a very nicely coded one from Project Seven) for my portfolio (linked in my name).
I think I may already be tiring of it. I’m going to give myself a little time living with it and see how I feel, though.
Thanks for your comments!
I’m totally contradicting myself with this post, since I completely fell in love with the lightbox last year and used it on several projects.
I guess it’s like anything in the world of design — too much of a good thing gets annoying.
Maybe the rounded corners thing will meet with the same fate … ?
Or even better, the glassy / reflection thing …