Pinderkent

One thing I've noticed getting more and more common is the use of survey hovers on the Web sites of a variety of companies. A typical scenario involves me going to their site to read up on one or more of their products, only to encounter a hover popup requesting me to take some survey, usually about the Web site itself. A good example of this is on Intel's Web site:

These survey hovers are too intrusive, especially on commercial sites. When I'm focused on finding the best product to buy, I want to be seeing product specifications and prices. I don't want to be distracted with survey participation requests.

Now, I could always take the survey, and hope there's some area where I can add my own comments and explain my annoyance with the survey popups. But somehow I think that my participation in the survey would be misconstrued to mean that the survey hovers are in fact working, and getting people to take the survey, ignoring the fact that the user suggestion is to drop the survey hovers. So I'll write about it here instead, and hope that some marketing folks see this posting.

I've got nothing against the surveys themselves, and can understand the need for customer feedback. I just really dislike the in-your-face approach of these hovers. From my perspective, they do more harm than whatever good they might bring. When on a commercial Web site, these hovers distract me (and probably others, as well) from focusing on the company's products, which can negatively affect my purchase of said products.