The other day, I sat with my grandmother in the living room and solved crosswords. She owns an iPhone for simple things, like using WhatsApp, making calls or taking pictures. On that note, I wanted to show her how to google things and browse the web to find information for the crossword. While showing her how to do it, I had to pause and realise this is something she won’t get. Websites are too overwhelming and cluttered with pop-ups. People like me, who are used to technology and live with it for a big chunk of our lives, have learned how to filter these things and click stuff away. But this is for sure not how things should be.
Tech-savvy users have learned how to deal with the cluttered web we face today.
Every time a pop-up appears, my grandmother is on high alert: “What’s wrong? Do I have to charge my phone?”. She carefully reads the text that just popped up, but most of the time still doesn’t understand it. Now imagine a cookie banner or ad pop-up showing up. First of all, she doesn’t know what a cookie is in this context, and second of all, she doesn’t know how to handle this situation. And all she wanted was to find the correct word for her crossword.
The web nowadays
Most websites show a pop-up right after you load them. That’s not usable; it’s not essential to a user who wants to find a specific piece of information. In my eyes, there’s not just a single reason to blame for that, but a couple of them.
Newsletter popups
People want my data; they want to send me their newest products, services, or articles into my email inbox. There are more subtle ways to do that for really interested people. Just showing a pop-up right after someone enters a website isn’t the most effective way, for sure. For most people, it’s just annoying or even frustrating. Also, not after scrolling for 500px down the page.
Cookie banner
Nowadays, it’s not just a banner anymore; no, it’s a full pop-up with opt-in/opt-out options. While regulators have a valid point about the privacy issue we face, the solution is far from user-friendly. We’re now at a point where most website owners don’t want to get into any legal battles and instead focus on their business. They choose the safest solutions and show a cookie pop-up which you have to accept before using the site. In that case, the user has to accept whatever cookies the website is using and can opt out of some when needed. What changed from before? Nothing. 99% of people handle it the same way they do with “privacy policy” in a contract—by checking it without bothering. One more useless pop-up or banner on the web. That was a fail on the part of regulators, site owners, and developers/designers.
Ads
The nastiest of all pop-ups are, for sure, ads. They’re designed to be clicked wrong and to end up on a different page. Luckily, I haven’t found that many on the web compared to apps. But ads don’t even have to be banners to be very distracting right away. On mobile, the viewport isn’t that big anyway. Having a banner or a full-width ad early at the top distracts from the full content already and makes it hard to scroll on the site.
Human verification
Are you a bot? Click this checkbox or solve this puzzle. Website owners want to protect access to their website, infrastructure and data from bots. Nowadays, with bots crawling the web to train AI, this is even more evident. So many choose to use CAPTCHA for critical parts, or Cloudflare also provides a common solution used nowadays. Cloudflare is fingerprinting your browsing behaviour to determine whether you’re a bot or a human. If it’s unsure before you’re entering a site where this feature is active, you will be presented with a page from Cloudflare to confirm you’re a human using a reCAPTCHA. That’s one more step a user shouldn’t have to face at all in the perfect world. It’s just not important. While I get where it comes from, for an average user, this is not understandable.
Solving the problem for my grandmother
Coming back to my grandmother’s issue. There’s no way I can show her how to deal with all these situations. They’re coming in all shapes, and there’s no unified pattern to teach her.
Using the web directly isn’t an option for my grandmother.
If my grandmother wants to profit from the fantastic piece of technology called the World Wide Web and its exceptional knowledge, we need a proper interface. One that is always the same and produces consistent output as well. The solution for my grandmother’s problem is an AI chatbot. She already knows how to use WhatsApp, so she can ask her questions to the integrated chatbot there and get a clear, plain-text response. No pop-up, no ads (so far). For her, that’s the most natural way to communicate, and she has access to all the information she needs for her crosswords. In addition, the language burden is also solved. She isn’t faced with complete English or half-translated text.
I’m aware this solution comes with other “bigger picture” difficulties and challenges. But the user experience is way better for a not-that-tech-savvy human being than using the web.
The average web fails at delivering user-friendly experiences, losing against apps.
Teaching others
It’s interesting through what a different lens we see, if we teach something to others. We encounter obstacles we would never have considered when doing it ourselves because we think differently. But when teaching, we place ourselves in someone else’s shoes and see things differently. My finding while teaching my grandmother how to browse the web and google things turned out to be a sad discovery for me as a web developer.
When teaching, we place ourselves in someone else’s shoes and see things differently.