Pop-up anyone?
The decision whether or not to use a pop-up on your website deserves some serious consideration. There is always work to be done on design and user experience to enable conversion and website engagement, but is using a pop-up the answer?
Our thoughts at Dental Design are to tread very carefully with the use of pop-ups and take advice from experienced designers who study user behaviour online for a living. That, and the fact that a 2013 survey found that 70% of internet users rated irrelevant pop-ups as the most annoying type of advertising, putting them on par with lottery scams!
Having said that, there is a time and place for everything, and including a pop-up in your website design might be the one thing that increases conversion such as someone filling in your contact form, downloading that newsletter, or giving you a call. Read on for my thoughts and feelings towards pop-ups backed by some evidence from fellow website UX bloggers and industry consensus.
What is a popup?
“Pop-up ads or pop-ups are often forms of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to attract web traffic or capture email addresses.[1] Pop-ups are generally new web browser windows to display advertisements. The pop-up window containing an advertisement is usually generated by JavaScript using cross-site scripting (XSS), sometimes with a secondary payload using Adobe Flash,[2] but can also be generated by other vulnerabilities/security holes in browser security.”
Wikipedia
I’ve used Wikipedia’s description, because they put it so well. A point to note is that if your pop-up is not actually being used to actually gain email addresses, then it’s not really doing what it is supposed to, and more likely to be putting people off.
Pros
There is some research suggesting that pop-ups do increase conversions. More importantly, the research shows that a page with a well designed and thoughtfully implemented pop-up converts better than one with a rubbish pop-up.
Relevant, thoughtful, and personalised pop-ups with clever, clean design can work well in gaining much needed emails or sign ups.
Cons
They are so annoying!
People don’t forget easily, and back in the 90’s browsing the web was a minefield of pop-ups, spam emails, fake sites and dodgy links. Unfortunately the humble pop-up can still instil fear into even the savviest online user. We are fearful of viruses which might infect our home/work PC and lose all our documents and photos! This is centred deep within the psyche of the web browser.
Rendering
And pop-ups aren’t merely annoying — if they’re not working properly, they can actually interfere with your site’s functionality. Some pop-ups that aren’t rendering properly can create a huge floating box over your posts and pages that people can’t exit out of — which means they’re going to get intensely frustrated because they’ll need to close their browser completely to get back to what they were doing.
In this age of multi device search and browsing, it really is hard to ensure your pop-up looks right across all of these platforms.
People want to stop them
If you search for ‘pop-up on the home page’, you get a whole list of sites which give advice of how to block pop-ups!
…a real indication of how searchers feel towards this design feature.
Best Practice
If you are going to use a pop-up, avoid these pitfalls:
- Hidden or inactive exit buttons that make your audience feel deceived
- Every additional input field in the pop-up will put people off completing it and off your website.
- Pushy pop-ups collect subscribers who are not really interested and who rarely become patients.
- Extra large pop-ups that occupy most of the readers screen make them more likely to leave
- Multiple pop-ups scream ‘spam’ to any sane website visitor
For a dental practice?
The big question is, should you be using pop-ups for a dental practice? My thoughts are:
- Not on the home page, and if you really do want to try and get users to download your newsletter, then make it as discrete, timely and polite as possible.
- Test, test and test again. The smallest change in text, position and design can make the difference in achieving the goal of the pop-up and alienating most of the visitors so much that they click the back button, bounce and never return.
- Have a reason for it. Just putting on a pop-up to direct a visitor to a particular page (which may only be relevant to a certain patient), will not do. Rather use is sparingly for a universal offer, seasonal promotion, or to remind visitors of an open evening.
- Design is key.
- If in doubt, steer clear.. Your website design should be enough to engage the user, who mostly are patients who ‘hate seeing the dentist’, and therefore want to have the most gentlest of experiences on your website.
To talk to Dental Design in more detail about pop-ups, or any other website design feature, call 01202 677227.
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