These days, most users associate popup windows with spam and annoyance. Nobody enjoys chasing popup windows when they open in a new tab or even behind the current browser. Over the past 1.5 years, one of our goals has been to exclude popup windows from our UI, a trend seen across the Web. Our only exception to this is when we have an external link on a client’s site. If a client links to a site outside of their own, we use a popup window so the user isn’t completely taken off of the client’s site.

For better user-experience, we now use modals instead of popup windows. A modal is a modern UI pattern similar to a popup window where a section of HTML pops up on top of the webpage, and the remaining portion of the webpage is typically greyed out. The user can focus on the “popped up” content, while never leaving the page. Modal technology helps us create a more integrated experience on the websites we build. No longer do users have to interact with a random window in order to pass information to a site: they can do so in a way that feels natural and expected.