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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

This will worsen the UX more often than not. Guaranteed.

You must use "telemetry" instead of actually talking to your users.

My company requires me to talk to the people who use the web sites I build. (I has a session just yesterday.) They hate modal windows. They even still refer to them as "pop-ups."

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You can't generalise like this. We use modals, drawers and new tabs where appropriate.

There's two words you must learn when talking about UI design - "It Depends".

The one general rule I will state that guides towards using a modal is if the user needs to stay within the context of the originating page and they must return to that page as part of the workflow that launched the modal. But there's also edge cases to this.

source: UXer with 25 years experience in both desktop and webapp.

People who say "it depends", without also explaining what it depends on, are not worth listening to. Someone who advocates for a silver bullet solution to a problem is more helpful than someone who won't make any recommendation at all, because "it all depends".

You can say it depends, if the entire point you are making is just that it depends!

It's unrealistic to outline all the different thought processes that would go into such a decisionn in a short comment on HN. And you could not hope to cover all the different things it depends on.

Neither of these statements are true (and the latter can be far more devastating as those types love to rush through changes without careful consideration), but you're free to repeat them as many times as you'd like in hopes they become true.

> You can't generalise like this.

I have never met that other kind of user.

Even when it's a small detail completely embedded on the context of the page, people get annoyed by modals. AFAIK, that happens on the desktop too (with the single exception of things like app settings).

I do believe in pushing a more usable design despite users not liking it a few times. But those times have to be few, and thus, you have to get a lot of extra usability out of it. Modal details isn't such an important use case, so I do recommend to avoid unless you gather your own evidence (and any UI recommendation can be ignored if you gather your own evidence), even if they are better.

I do recommend a default to avoid almost all of the use-cases people are posting for modals:

- click to enlarge is much better done inline;

- alerts are that one thing where modals became a caricature, modal alerts are absolutely shit;

- confirmation prompts should be avoided as much as you can (yeah, if you can't, make a modal);

- the 2 minutes rule from the OP, nope, if it can't be done inline, you can put it in another page.

> You must use "telemetry" instead of actually talking to your users.

I mean, there are several people in this thread who like modals as users. I’m another one of those. I find modals very useful, as long as you don’t do them in a crappy way. You shouldn’t insult people just because your experience was different.

It depends on the website in question, of course, but I'm not sure the readers of HN reflect the views of most users.

Just because your mother called you special doesn't make your experiences valid.

They ARE pop-ups mostly. Just ones that are harder to block as compared to the 1990s pop-ups.

Yep: devs call them "modals" while users call them "pop-ups" but they're the same thing.

Now, native browser modals (think Javascript's alert()) don't use the same underlying technology as HTML/CSS modals (think Bootstrap's modal component), but at the end of the day they're both modals/pop-ups.

YMMV. If you are building a single page app for expert users in a domain, and editing an entity changes the visual context by going to a different page, that doesn't go down well in my experience. We tried it once, with multiple iterations, and in the end had to roll it back to modals because the complaints were endless.

I freakin love it when it goes to a different page with its own URL. Stakeholders/customers can just create a spreadsheet directly to the relevant link if they have a lot of things they are trying to track outside the software (think inventory management stuff).

I'd love to hear some unexpected insights you got from asking users.

I'd love to hear some unexpected insights you got from asking users.

There are too many to list here. Things that the sort of people who read HN would never imagine.

One is that a surprising number of users don't know to press the "Search" button after they enter text into a search field. They will just sit there for a bit and when nothing happens, they assume it's broken.

I haven't followed up on this yet, but I suspect it's because people have gotten so used to autocomplete.

Your company requires you to talk to users, yet it seems you still haven’t gotten the memo that you shouldn’t make blanket assumptions without talking to people about actual use cases. “Users hate modal windows” is about as meaningless as “users hate open in new tab” without context.

You pontificate, but didn't get the memo about not making things up.

I never made any blanket assumptions and never wrote "Users hate modal windows."

Reading is fundamental.

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