Modal, Pop-Up, & Layer Confusion
So during my time at Autotrader, my co-workers and myself were guilty of using the terms Modal Window, Pop-Up, and Layer interchangeably do describe something that displayed to a user in a dialog box fashion.
Yesterday, a co-worker of mine was kind enough to point out that my requirement of “the system shall display a Modal Window” was totally incorrect because I was butchering the true meaning of the word. So needless to say I did what most people would do…I went to Wikipedia…
Modal Window – “a modal window is a child window that requires the user to interact with it before they can return to operating the parent application, thus preventing the workflow on the application main window.”
Pop-Up – A context menu (also called contextual, shortcut, and popup or pop-up menu) is a menu in a graphical user interface (GUI) that appears upon user interaction, such as a right mouse click. A context menu offers a limited set of choices that are available in the current state, or context, of the operating system or application.
