A Single Article

Eh, popups

I was administrating a site on Lunarpages today when I came across this little gem:

What’s going on here? I’m hovering over the link to “Change Password” and I’m getting this massive popup with an image-based tutorial on what I can do when I reach the “Change Password” page. I really can’t understand the logic behind this… for one thing, the various sections of the admin interface are very obvious. I believe that interfaces should be naturally obvious, and Lunarpages does a good job of that simply by following conventions. I’ve never needed a tutorial for their interface and even if I did, a separate link to a “help” page would be fine. Moreover, once I know what a section does and how it works I don’t need to see the tutorial again. In this admin section, the popups come up every time, over and over again. After a while it’s not useful at all, just annoying.

It comes back to the whole “cool = useful” argument… whoever was behind this feature must have thought that because it was cool, it would in turn be useful, but usually it doesn’t work that way. You can’t just assume that a cool feature is going to be useful; you must first justify that it is useful and then there’s a pretty good chance that users will consider it cool because they find it so easy to use.