Damn Popovers

Cookie banners are still a nuisance.

GDPR, the European privacy law, seems like a perfect example of bureaucratic disimprovement, but as a professional web developer, I still don't get why so many companies and their UX designers chose to implement cookie banners in a way that obscures the content and makes it maximally inaccessible?! If they have UX designers at all...

And if they don't use obtrusive cookie banners, sure they'll have a newsletter signup form that pops up just when you were about to click on a link or a menu entry.

What's our answer as web professionals? Conceiving a better technological popover implementation so that our customers can distract and annoy their customers using native browser standards instead of custom code? Where's the real benefit?

Enshittification ftw? wtf! 💩

I have been reading and researching about enshittification lately.

Like the dead internet, enshittification and disimprovement seem counterintutitive from a naive usability perspective. Why, just why would it make sense to distract users to reach their goals quickly without disturbance?

I mean, can't we just show them the product or information they were looking for, make it easy to proceed to the checkout and select a suitable payment method, and then, only then, optionally, offer upselling extras?

Why does distraction help customer retention at all? Why wouldn't they eventually get so annoyed that they just leave our service and use an alternative instead?

Because there are no better alternatives?

Until there are. Apple and Google are often quoted as examples of disrupting established industries by introducing innovative, and more specifically, more minimal, alternatives.

Now they, too, have joined the slop of enshittification.

Disenshittification

This is just a quick reminder that a call to action does not necessarily need to be a modal dialog disturbing and preventing users from doing what they were doing.

Obtrusive cookie banners are no necessity either. Websites without cookies are possible. Subtle small banners and dialogs placed in the footer or at the bottom of the viewport can still be striking enough to fulfil legal requirements.

Just saying.