Traditionally, the most convenient way for web developers to buzz the user with a message has been the javascript alert() pop-up. It is convenient to code and ensures that the user doesn’t miss the message (no way to go back to the page till the user clicks OK or whatever prompts you’ve coaxed in)
Today this very pop-up is a major hassle for users, just because in multi-tabbed interfaces, the user cannot switch between tabs when an alert is displayed to him. So you have an irritated user who wants to urgently book a flight in the next page, but is stuck on your tab because you have provided some text for him to understand and press OK.
This is still ok when the alert is shown on the press of a button. There is a higher probability of the user being still focussed on your page. But alerts on page load, notifying “Successfully performed operation” are nothing but rot.
To grab user attention while user is on your page, a far more elegant way is the use of div based message boxes. This keeps the user interface consistent with the remaining website and also grants user space for some other (possibly precious) activity. The new CSS opacity attributes also let you gray-out the page background whilst displaying your error — pretty neat.
While you are proceeding towards unobtrusive interfaces like a good kid, why not also give a thought to what ought to be the messages warranting a pop-up? Oracle ADF, which we use for development, has 3 levels of messages:
- Info, Warning: Display at the top of the page with appropriate icon
- Error: Display as a div based pop-up to the user, gray out the remaining page, ensuring the user cannot perform any activity till he selects an option to handle or acknowledge the error.
The good part is that the behavior of messages is built into the framework. So if tomorrow a usability test suggests that warning messages better be shown as a popup so the user doesn’t miss them, there’s a 3 line change in the framework to enable this. Clean, easy, cool. That’s the way we want it.