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> This will worsen the UX more often than not. Guaranteed. The article states very clearly the use cases for which modals make sense: Modal windows can be

> This will worsen the UX more often than not. Guaranteed. The article states very clearly the use cases for which modals make sense: Modal windows can be used for views that don't constitute a "resource" or correspond to a domain entity: - Alerts - Confirmation dialogs - Forms for creating/updating entities As soon as something is a resource, that is, an article to read, a picture to watch, a diagram to open, a sound to play, in short anything for which it makes sense that it should be reachable via an URI, a modal is the wrong choice.

smeagull 3y ago
And it's wrong about all of them. Alerts don't need to stop the world. Confirmation dialogs block examining the things that you want to confirm. And forms for creating anything do not need to block access to the rest of the page.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  I tend to agree. Modals are just contextually different things and even if some/most of your users understand that it's extra cognative load that may not be required for what the app or web page is doing. Such questions as "if I close this modal is that different from using the cancel button?" should not even need to be dealt with by the user.
- usrbinbash 3y ago
  I agree, and I also don't think that modals should be used for these things. I merely also agree with the article that these are use cases when a modal "can" be used. It still isn't a good solution, but at least it doesn't actively hurt my ability to access a resource.
- wizofaus 3y ago
  Except I've seen countless times that users ignore stuff if they can, including important warnings etc. Ideally confirmations should be kept to a minimum anyway (and instead ensure all actions are reversible), but in cases that's not possible I'd rather have a confirmation show in a modal where I can at least see the page/context it's referring to (and it goes without saying, all modals should be draggable, even for touchscreen devices) than a separate page entirely. And if an action can't be performed then I'd much rather see the reason why in a modal window that grabs my attention and forces me to acknowledge it than a button that appears to do nothing but cause some easy-to-miss message show up elsewhere on the page.
  - smeagull 3y ago
    > users ignore stuff if they can, including important warnings etc. They sure do. Especially modal dialogs. Everybody has been trained to hit okay automatically, because they're so prevalent on things that don't matter. Good apps track history and have undo. Apps that have changes that matter use more drastic things than modal dialogs. Just try deleting things on AWS.
horsawlarway 3y ago
> As soon as something is a resource, that is, an article to read, a picture to watch, a diagram to open, a sound to play, in short anything for which it makes sense that it should be reachable via an URI, a modal is the wrong choice. These feel incredibly unrelated to me. Why does that matter at all for the display choice? A modal is getting used because it's a view into another section of the application that doesn't lose the current location of the user. Further - users (and I mean normal paying users, not HN commentators) rarely ever give a shit about URLs. It's just not important to most people what the string of characters is. So... Anywhere you've got multiple steps to complete, or an adjacent resource that might be related and viewed/edited in the context of the parent resource. Or a form is being filled in and a user wants to enable extras, which requires filling in a different form, etc... The modal is about not losing the current place for the user. Because most current users don't use multiple tabs/windows for the same product, and they don't pay any attention to the urls. "Dont open a modal" in cases where the user is likely going to get lost in a detour otherwise is bad advice.
- scbrg 3y ago
  > Further - users (and I mean normal paying users, not HN commentators) rarely ever give a shit about URLs. It's just not important to most people what the string of characters is. This is not correct. Normal users have learned that if they copy that URL thingie, and send it to someone else, that someone else will see the same thing they see now. I don't know how many times I've received a link from someone saying "lol look at this hilarious dog" and ended up on some useless overview page completely devoid of hilarious dogs. Because some fucking designer decided to do exactly what TFA is complaining about.
  - mock-possum 3y ago
    Fair, but there’s no reason a URL can’t resolve to a landing page and already open modal state populated with the content the other person shared to you. Deeplinking / permalinking works just as well with modals as it does with anchor named content blocks below the fold.
    - 3y ago
mmis1000 3y ago
Modal sometimes also works as a peek view of a resource. As when there are many resource in a list, you don't want to open every one in a new tab. In fact, you can make a link open modal with left click but open in new tab with middle click. I think it is the most balanced way in my opinion. Modal and tab can co-exist. They are not really mutually exclusive. BTW, social media websites generally implements this in their feed view. A image behaves different when you click it with middle or left click.
- usrbinbash 3y ago
  > Modal sometimes also works as a peek view of a resource. That's what thumbnails and stubs are for. > In fact, you can make a link open modal with left click but open in new tab with middle click. I think it is the most balanced way in my opinion. Cool. How do I "middle click" on my phone? Left click is "open resource" by default. If a webapp doesn't have a damn good reason to overwrite the browsers default behavior, it shouldn't. And "we thought it would make the design really pop", is not one of those reasons.
  - mmis1000 3y ago
    > Cool. How do I "middle click" on my phone? Try long press and open in new tab. Besides, open in modal don't even mean the url won't change. Fb, reddit both open in popup AND change the url. Copy the url to other browser would just work as intended. It is already a resolved problem in my opinion.
    - usrbinbash 3y ago
      > but at least this part of it is trivially easy to implement. It was a resolved problem before that, by letting the browser do what the browser is good at, instead of implementing new UI paradigms on top of it. > Besides, open in modal don't even mean the url won't change. Fb, reddit both open in popup AND change the url. So I add more code, and thus more complexity to websites, in order for the browser to behave in the way it would have already behaved in the first place, had I not thrown the modal in there, and instead let it work as intended.
ablob 3y ago
Depending on my use-case I strongly prefer a modal. A new tab would be highly disruptive, if I just wanted a glimpse over the content. This is yet another instance of optimizing for something that can not be made perfect. Let me decide what I want. Give me the option to do both without much of a hassle. If a decision needs to be made regarding what should happen on a mouse-click, one may choose a sensible default (i.e. what is the most typical use-case), while leaving the option to configure the other choice. You can always argue that many options are a non-goal, but any sufficiently sophisticated software needs training anyway. Configuration can be a part of that. Nothing is worse than a program in which the designer chose to make your use-case to be painful to be met. Furthermore, a uri does not need to be bound to a view. In fact, one might prefer different ways to look at the same data.
- WillPostForFood 3y ago
  A new tab would be highly disruptive, if I just wanted a glimpse over the content. I know how to close a tab, be it via keyboard shortcut or mouse click. I know how to resize it. I know how to print it. When content I want to glimpse at opens in a modal, I know none of that. Even if it is well designed, different sites will have different engagement paradigms. My current pet peeve with modals is when I try to select text with the mouse, and drag past the edge of the modal, it closes.
  - ablob 3y ago
    This is why I encouraged the choice of configuration, as can bee seen in the paragraphs below your citation. The intended message of my comment is that different people prefer different things. Modal windows and how they interact with the user is obviously something that should be standardized, but that is a different discussion.
    - usrbinbash 3y ago
      > Modal windows and how they interact with the user is obviously something that should be standardized, It already is. It's called tabs.

smeagull 3y ago

And it's wrong about all of them. Alerts don't need to stop the world. Confirmation dialogs block examining the things that you want to confirm. And forms for creating anything do not need to block access to the rest of the page.

SoftTalker 3y ago
I tend to agree. Modals are just contextually different things and even if some/most of your users understand that it's extra cognative load that may not be required for what the app or web page is doing. Such questions as "if I close this modal is that different from using the cancel button?" should not even need to be dealt with by the user.
usrbinbash 3y ago
I agree, and I also don't think that modals should be used for these things. I merely also agree with the article that these are use cases when a modal "can" be used. It still isn't a good solution, but at least it doesn't actively hurt my ability to access a resource.
wizofaus 3y ago
Except I've seen countless times that users ignore stuff if they can, including important warnings etc. Ideally confirmations should be kept to a minimum anyway (and instead ensure all actions are reversible), but in cases that's not possible I'd rather have a confirmation show in a modal where I can at least see the page/context it's referring to (and it goes without saying, all modals should be draggable, even for touchscreen devices) than a separate page entirely. And if an action can't be performed then I'd much rather see the reason why in a modal window that grabs my attention and forces me to acknowledge it than a button that appears to do nothing but cause some easy-to-miss message show up elsewhere on the page.
- smeagull 3y ago
  > users ignore stuff if they can, including important warnings etc. They sure do. Especially modal dialogs. Everybody has been trained to hit okay automatically, because they're so prevalent on things that don't matter. Good apps track history and have undo. Apps that have changes that matter use more drastic things than modal dialogs. Just try deleting things on AWS.

horsawlarway 3y ago

> As soon as something is a resource, that is, an article to read, a picture to watch, a diagram to open, a sound to play, in short anything for which it makes sense that it should be reachable via an URI, a modal is the wrong choice. These feel incredibly unrelated to me. Why does that matter at all for the display choice? A modal is getting used because it's a view into another section of the application that doesn't lose the current location of the user. Further - users (and I mean normal paying users, not HN commentators) rarely ever give a shit about URLs. It's just not important to most people what the string of characters is. So... Anywhere you've got multiple steps to complete, or an adjacent resource that might be related and viewed/edited in the context of the parent resource. Or a form is being filled in and a user wants to enable extras, which requires filling in a different form, etc... The modal is about not losing the current place for the user. Because most current users don't use multiple tabs/windows for the same product, and they don't pay any attention to the urls. "Dont open a modal" in cases where the user is likely going to get lost in a detour otherwise is bad advice.

scbrg 3y ago
> Further - users (and I mean normal paying users, not HN commentators) rarely ever give a shit about URLs. It's just not important to most people what the string of characters is. This is not correct. Normal users have learned that if they copy that URL thingie, and send it to someone else, that someone else will see the same thing they see now. I don't know how many times I've received a link from someone saying "lol look at this hilarious dog" and ended up on some useless overview page completely devoid of hilarious dogs. Because some fucking designer decided to do exactly what TFA is complaining about.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  Fair, but there’s no reason a URL can’t resolve to a landing page and already open modal state populated with the content the other person shared to you. Deeplinking / permalinking works just as well with modals as it does with anchor named content blocks below the fold.
  - 3y ago

mmis1000 3y ago

Modal sometimes also works as a peek view of a resource. As when there are many resource in a list, you don't want to open every one in a new tab. In fact, you can make a link open modal with left click but open in new tab with middle click. I think it is the most balanced way in my opinion. Modal and tab can co-exist. They are not really mutually exclusive. BTW, social media websites generally implements this in their feed view. A image behaves different when you click it with middle or left click.

usrbinbash 3y ago
> Modal sometimes also works as a peek view of a resource. That's what thumbnails and stubs are for. > In fact, you can make a link open modal with left click but open in new tab with middle click. I think it is the most balanced way in my opinion. Cool. How do I "middle click" on my phone? Left click is "open resource" by default. If a webapp doesn't have a damn good reason to overwrite the browsers default behavior, it shouldn't. And "we thought it would make the design really pop", is not one of those reasons.
- mmis1000 3y ago
  > Cool. How do I "middle click" on my phone? Try long press and open in new tab. Besides, open in modal don't even mean the url won't change. Fb, reddit both open in popup AND change the url. Copy the url to other browser would just work as intended. It is already a resolved problem in my opinion.
  - usrbinbash 3y ago
    > but at least this part of it is trivially easy to implement. It was a resolved problem before that, by letting the browser do what the browser is good at, instead of implementing new UI paradigms on top of it. > Besides, open in modal don't even mean the url won't change. Fb, reddit both open in popup AND change the url. So I add more code, and thus more complexity to websites, in order for the browser to behave in the way it would have already behaved in the first place, had I not thrown the modal in there, and instead let it work as intended.

ablob 3y ago

Depending on my use-case I strongly prefer a modal. A new tab would be highly disruptive, if I just wanted a glimpse over the content. This is yet another instance of optimizing for something that can not be made perfect. Let me decide what I want. Give me the option to do both without much of a hassle. If a decision needs to be made regarding what should happen on a mouse-click, one may choose a sensible default (i.e. what is the most typical use-case), while leaving the option to configure the other choice. You can always argue that many options are a non-goal, but any sufficiently sophisticated software needs training anyway. Configuration can be a part of that. Nothing is worse than a program in which the designer chose to make your use-case to be painful to be met. Furthermore, a uri does not need to be bound to a view. In fact, one might prefer different ways to look at the same data.

WillPostForFood 3y ago
A new tab would be highly disruptive, if I just wanted a glimpse over the content. I know how to close a tab, be it via keyboard shortcut or mouse click. I know how to resize it. I know how to print it. When content I want to glimpse at opens in a modal, I know none of that. Even if it is well designed, different sites will have different engagement paradigms. My current pet peeve with modals is when I try to select text with the mouse, and drag past the edge of the modal, it closes.
- ablob 3y ago
  This is why I encouraged the choice of configuration, as can bee seen in the paragraphs below your citation. The intended message of my comment is that different people prefer different things. Modal windows and how they interact with the user is obviously something that should be standardized, but that is a different discussion.
  - usrbinbash 3y ago
    > Modal windows and how they interact with the user is obviously something that should be standardized, It already is. It's called tabs.