I don’t think you would ever hear me argue that unsolicited popup windows are a great tool for achieving user-friendliness, but my experience has been that they can be a useful tool for achieving message emphasis.  Quite often in Web design you have to give something up to get something.  The key is to find the proper balance between competing ideals. 

Popups get results, but everybody hates them.  We all want results ASAP, but I have not seen many successful Web sites that don't depend upon return visitors.  It's very difficult to make a sale or fully inform your audience on the first visit.  You almost always need your visitor to come back to you more than once before you can get done whatever it is you want to get done with her.  That necessity would suggest that you stay away from anything that would ever annoy a visitor, and popup windows do annoy visitors.  I’ve seen the scathing emails to prove it.

So kill all your popups now before you make any more enemies - right?  I don't think so.  Let's take a look at what's good about a popup window and see if there are some ways we can use what’s good without discouraging visitors from returning to our sites.

What's Good

• They don't take up page real estate.  You don't have to redesign a page to promote a temporary offer or a mailing list subscription form.  
   
• They get noticed.  My newsletter subscriptions triple when I use a popup window to promote OutFront News.  A mailing list is by far the best way I know to get visitors to return to a site.  It's very difficult to ignore a technique that triples the effectiveness of your most important marketing tool.  No?

Avoiding What's Bad

I suppose I can't just tell you how or if you should use a popup window on your site, but I can tell you how I've come to use a popup on mine.  I believe it will have significance for many of you.

First of all, I designed OutFront with the assumption that many visitors would behave as I do and kill any popup before they even see what it is, also with the knowledge that many visitors have popup preventing software installed.  My newsletter subscription box is in my home page.  I've played with moving it into a popup window over and under the home page, but visitors made it clear that this is a mistake for a site that's concerned about earning visitor loyalty.  It's in there.  It’s not on there or under there.  I believe that will always be so.

I struggled in my mind for more than a year with the problem of how to get back to those juicy popup subscription numbers without making anybody mad.  I tried doing more to highlight the subscription form, but that made the home page look like nothing more than an offer for a newsletter.  Last year an OutFront Forums member posted a script that made it so a popup only appears the first time the user hits the page containing the script.  It will appear again the next day or the next month or the next year or whatever you set it to, but it won't drive buggy the folks who use the home page as the primary means of navigation or the folks that want to come back to your site quite a few times in the course of a day.

It finally came to me that the most profitable people to get onto my mailing list were the ones who were immediately interested in shopping on my site.  I decided that these folks might even be happy to be reminded to join a mailing list that they might have skipped over while on the home page.  I decided to place a popup script in an include page on all of my shopping cart pages because visitors often enter my shopping cart on pages other than the main page.  You can click here to see what I'm talking about.  Currently, the script activates a popup once and then not again for 1 day. 

My subscription rate is just as high as it was when I had the popup on my home page every time a visitor hit it.  Am I annoying anyone?  Maybe I am, but not as much as I used to.  The popup page has no graphics.  It's small with just a bit of a live text and the shortest possible form.  I want it to display its message before you can get your mouse over there to kill it. 

Yes, I still have a subscription box in my home page and in my shopping pages.  There's nothing wrong with redundancy on the Web.  Visitor A might miss your offer the first time it appears even if it’s right in front of her face.  Offer it again, and visitor A might just be glad you did and is unlikely to notice the redundancy -- unless, of course, you're throwing popups in her face every time she clicks the mouse.

Below is the script that I've been using to make my popup less annoying.  I can't say for sure that it's the right thing for you to do, but it seems to be right for me. 

You only need to change a couple of lines to make this script work properly for you.

var expDays = 1;

You can change the 1 in the line above to 0 when you’re testing to make sure the window pops up properly.  A 0 will allow the popup to activate every time you hit the page.  You can then set it to 1 or however many days you want the window to remain quiet.

var page = "/subscribe.htm";

The line above controls the Web page the popup calls.  Just put the path to the page you want called in place of “/subscribe.htm.”

I like to use this script in an include page, so I put it just under the body tag in that page.  Normally speaking, it would go above the </head> tag, but FP include pages only read what’s between <body> and </body>.  It doesn’t hurt anything to put this script in the body.

Clearly this technique is not the right solution for every situation, but it is at the very least an interesting exercise to see that the choices and trade-offs you make in designing your Web are not necessarily black and white.  May you always search for and discover the best balance between competing goals in your Web projects.

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