Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Lightbox
Raised as a usability problem by 9 people on Hacker News over 7 years (2009–2015), in 8 threads.
People raised many different problems with Lightbox, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 9 complaints
- Modal popups have inconsistent dismiss controls, unlike old popup windows with the X in the same place2015-05-29
- Close "x" is tiny and often intentionally hard to find2013-11-26
- Ctrl+click is hijacked so the image can't open in a new tab2012-05-31
- Close button looks like expand icon, user can't tell how to close2012-03-20
- Links unexpectedly open an overlay instead of navigating, adding extra steps to close2012-02-23
- Nav buttons are off-screen, so user must scroll down the page to reach them2010-11-08
- Lightboxes that don't respond to the back button break user expectations2010-11-08
- Users reflexively close the whole browser window instead of dismissing the lightbox2009-09-21
- Close link sits below the fold, so users must scroll to dismiss2009-08-29