Do you get fascinated by that sliding pop up that appears on your screen when you tap your phone? Introduce: the Modal!
It is a component in your screen that is set to hide or appear when you press a button it is associated with. Initially, I thought it was another screen, for it can cover the whole landscape, but that depends on how much of a show and tell you have set it for. It is linked to the same screen as the behaviour is dependent on interaction with a component in it.
Say, you want to add a contact or create a new message. You see the plus (+) sign and you tap it. There comes the Modal, a component with content offering you to choose from options and get to your mission. Sometimes the modal can be set to get dismissed with a button inside it. Sometimes it can be programmed such that tapping elsewhere on the screen will make it disappear. The latter is swifter behaviour as the user does not need to think of where to click to close the modal and can quickly interact with the rest of the screen when done with the intended functionality.
The modals I created emerged from the bottom of the screen in what is termed as an animation. They offered options that a user could pursue further to the screen’s content. The modal’s appearance can be set to be more focused than the rest of the screen by adding a greyed out effect on content outside it or by changing the background color of the modal itself. The color contrast on a mobile screen often guides the user about which interaction is more important and expected next.
With modals running in from the edges of the screen to offer you more information that you can tap and access, they provide a neat and chic way of connecting the user to more resources without cluttering the screen with information overload.
