Skip to content

Pop-ups Are Bad For Usability, Example

Everybody hates pop-ups. This time I have a bad usability example of Amazon.com, in contrary to Tesco yesterday’s article about how to avoid pop-ups to show product pictures to users.

When you click on the product picture on the product description page, Amazon splashes a pop-up window with a bigger picture.

Amazon 20071213

Why this is bad? Amazon’s target is everybody, they are a super store, so it could be that many of it’s users don’t know much about computers. One example I can imagine is that many users have pop-up blockers but they don’t know they have it, so they they will never see the pictures.

That means that many users will not get all the information they need to decide.

Sometimes you have to use pop-ups, but try to avoid them if you can. On yesterday’s article you can see how this could have been avoided by Amazon.

Categories: Bad Design, Online Retailers, Online Shopping, Pop-ups, Usability.

Comment Feed

3 Responses

  1. Are you sure it will be blocked by the pop-up blocker?



Some HTML is OK

or, reply to this post via trackback.

Continuing the Discussion

  1. [...] Brion shares how Amazon’s pop-up product pictures are poor usability, and how Tesco shows us a better [...]

  2. [...] Design Vs. Art Blog: Pop-ups Are Bad for Usability [...]