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Lightbox fatigue

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Caitlin
Posted in ia/uxd methods, interactions & patterns, user-topia

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?

  • http://zodomatica.com Tzaddi

    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 ;-)

  • http://www.hitthosekeys.com/portfolios.html Lisa

    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.

  • http://caitlingannon.com Caitlin

    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 …

  • http://tingtink.com Janet

    Ha! I just stumbled on this post (I landed on your site because I was searching on “data visualization software” in Google images, and your snowflake.jpg came up in the top line. It’s lovely.)

    Your post made me laugh because my latest pet peeve is Facebook’s photo light box, which appears whenever I click on a photo posted by a friend in my News Feeds. And it makes me NUTS. I liked going to the friend’s page. I don’t want a flipping light box of their photo. I have seen way more light boxes than I ever need to again in my life, even though they can be useful.

    Sadly, in the 3 years that have passed since you posted this, light boxes, roundies, and glassy reflections don’t seem to have gone away. Instead, they’re being canonized in CSS3.

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