I was reading a story on FT.com about eBay’s new measures to prevent fraud, and encountered a popup as I scrolled down the web page.
I actually found this popup both useful and unobtrusive.
In this particular case, as my mouse cursor rolled over a link in the story to Amazon, up popped a little graph showing the share price movement.
When I moved the mouse away, the popup gently faded away.
Normally, I dislike popups that appear when you move your mouse over links as they tend to suddenly emerge in an unexpected and unwelcome manner. The worst are the in-your-face ones that generate a little screenshot of a website and those on sites where it seems every other word is a link that produces a popup ad.
This one on FT.com, though, shows how to do it well.
It goes to show you shouldn’t do something because you can but because it makes sense to the context.