What’s Wrong With Using Lightbox JS for Content

Most of us have encountered it online. It is a design/interaction element that has been adopted widely on a huge range of sites, from big corporations to blogs. For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about, check out the this example. I have been reluctant to use if for the following reasons:

It is worse than a pop up.
That’s right, a Lightbox is actually worse than a popup. It makes it impossible to access the underlying web page. Pop ups can actually be dragged away to a different part of the window, allowing me to continue browsing whereas a Lightbox stays there.

It breaks interaction rules
This one is probably more annoying than the previous one. In all modern browsers (Opera, Firefox, Safari IE7) middle clicking on a link results in a new tab. When a Lightbox link or a lot of other links with some Javascript action associated with it is clicked with the middle button, this results either a new page being loaded in a new browser containing exactly the same content as the one you clicked or a page with entirely different content than the one you would have gotten if you had left clicked the link. The last action is preferable but it remains strange, it implies that the way you click/open a link determines the content of the resulting page.

Function follows Form
Lightbox is a clear example of form being more important than function. It looks damn cool but it’s actual advantages over a simple picture is minimal.

However, having said all that, I do recognize that there are certain advantages to using Lightbox. Examples are dedicated gallery pages where it is actually not desirable to leave the page to see a picture. Somehow though, Lightbox is still worse than a pop up in this case. Another example is a login box. Login boxes are different to pictures in the sense that there are never more than one type of login as opposed to browsing a gallery of pictures. This is the fundamental difference between content and interaction on site. A login is a small hurdle in the work flow. We login because we have to, not because we really want to and we usually only do so once, it is dedicated task. You can be browsing a lot of pictures on a site but you will only login once.