Huge Banners are Ugly and Spammy

Continuing the discussion from Survey banner reappears after refresh:

Me neither. And it must be especially annoying for non-logged in users who clear the cookies when closing the browser (e.g. Tor Browser).

Then the question becomes: what do we do with the banner. The alternative is pinned posts, which is also a bit annoying, but maybe a bit less?

Does anyone else have feedback about this?


For context: we’re talking about banners like these.

Since we don’t have metrics we don’t really know how many users this made fill in the survey… Something we should also consider.

I do think pinned posts would be less annoying. I personally prefer a more laissez-faire approach: If a post is important enough, it should stay near the top organically. If it doesn’t, then maybe it’s not as important as we think. Either way, let the users decide. This won’t work for everything, but I think it would work for things like the survey.

@ninavizz has metrics for the survey itself, but we don’t know the “click-through rate” for this particular banner.

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interesting point - agree with that in some scenarios. will hearting/liking a post keep it at the top or does it need a reply? If it needs a reply, and replies are not relevant/made much (but the content of the original post really, really is) then what mechanism would keep it organically near the top?

Personally, I find banners easy if logged in. If I’m using privacy tools, they get on my nerves on many site as they are there every time I visit, like @deeplow points out.

I don’t think so. So the survey would likely not stay at the top for long.

Oof, @deeplow let’s please kill the banner—and not pin the post for the survey, either. All of the regular users willing to take it, have taken it—and at this point it’s mostly collecting insight from new users.

Survey fatigue is a real thing. For the first 3 months when it launched in 2020, it was important ¡TO POST A LINK TO THE SURVEY FAR AND WIDE SO EVERYONE COULD SEE AND PARTICIPATE! That has thankfully happened, and now the survey is positioned appropriately on the Qubes website to catch the attention of new users, or folks visiting the downloads page for the first time in a while. :slight_smile:

At this point, I think we’ve received a few thousand responses to this survey. For the appmenu survey, I believe the count of completed surveys was over 750. Both numbers are very high, for the standard of survey participation—which is around 10% of all users reached by a message.

When we run one-off surveys, I will want those to be done as banners or pinned posts—but it’s essential to not impose cognitive fatigue upon users by doing this too often. TY for caring and for keeping user research needs at the top of your list for the forum migration! :slight_smile:

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Understood! :+1: Banner removed for the sake of everyone’s cognition. Haha.

What an incredible community we have :slight_smile:

:heart:

That’s why I said this won’t work for everything. There are legitimate use cases where it won’t work and where we may want to pin stuff to the top.

Well, it depends on how it’s worded and what it asks for. People posting that they completed the survey or giving feedback on the survey could be organic bumps.

Anyway, I don’t really care one way or the other. I just know that, as a user of the Web, I’m tired of sites trying to shove things down my throat that I have no interest in or that I’m already done with.

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I read the title and had no idea what ‘banners’ refered to, so for a second I thought we were talking about signatures like these: