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Website owners are desperate to capture your attention, they have a few seconds to do so. What they don't realize is that beong annoying is also what causes people to only stay for a few seconds on their site. For me it is a good sign of someone who cares more about advertisement than content so it makes me close the page 99% of the time.

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Totally agreed... if only I could get management to listen too. If were it up to me as a dev, there would NEVER be popups/overlays. We spend forever optimizing UX before and during site design, only to have some middle manager come in at the last minute and say "We need a newsletter modal signup to drive conversions." They end up chasing signup numbers instead of overall user satisfaction.

People say this on HN all the time, but from my experience doing watching real users, it’s not true for most people on most websites. If we believe the information is useful, we’ll stay, regardless of how (un)appealing we find the design.

In my experience, most people interpret minimalist websites as being run by small, poor companies. Thus, a flashy website is the equivalent of renting a Ferrari to drive to an interview. It fools a lot of people - even some of us technical folk more often than we realise.

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