Question

We’ve all seen the popular lightbox effects on the web (e.g. JQuery Lightbox and Shadowbox). Yesterday I got into a discussion with a client who is completely enamored with lightboxes and wants to use them every time a form is submitted including:

• Login forms – click the login button and the lightbox appears with the user name and password fields
• Customer Inquiry forms – Lightbox appears with a “thank you” after form submission
• Registration forms – Lightbox appears with a “thank you” after form submission

I want to know when people think lightboxes should and should not be used and why.

Answer 1

Acceptable uses, IMHO:

1. single-step forms (or the first step of a multi-step form)
2. detailed information (enlarged graphic or in-depth description of something)
3. confirmation or other feedback messages

Ideally, for each, you’d gracefully degrade to a full-fledged separate URL/HTML resource. This provides bookmarkability (assuming your lightbox doesn’t do history management) as well as search engine crawlability.

If you do choose to use them, it’s vital that they be used consistently. Since they are essentially a new UI pattern, users expect to (subconsciously) be able to understand how you apply the pattern. This enhances their trust in the site and ability to predict the site’s behavior.