Inside Technique : One-Time Pop-up Windows
By Scott Isaacs

Automatic pop-up windows are considered one of the evils of web-site design. So why did we choose to have our survey displayed through an automatic pop-up window?

While often considered evil, pop-up windows can be the quickest and most efficient way to get a response or to reach your visitors with a targeted message. When we first created our survey we tried politely asking everyone to go to the survey to fill it out. This worked but our response rate was very slow (127 responses over 2 weeks). We then decided to push the survey by automatically displaying it when you visit the home page. In just under a day we have already doubled the number of responses. Therefore, in the case of our survey, we so far consider the pop-up window an overwhelming success.

We designed our pop-up window with the following constraints:

1. The window should only display once - regardless if the user fills out the survey or not.
2. The pop-up script will not slow the parsing of the home page.
3. The window automatically goes away after the user fills out the survey.
4. The window is positioned in the upper-left of the window (when supported by the client's browser).
5. The window will contain no extra advertising. Our goal is get survey responses, not advertising impressions.

All but the last constraint involves a small amount of script. The last constraint is recognition that our goal is to get feedback and not to generate advertising dollars with our pop-up window. We list it because it is extremely important that you are careful when you infringe on your user's personal space when using pop-up windows.

Next, we explain how we control the display of the pop-up window.

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