The Modal Slammer
Closeus immediatus
Appearance
The defining feature is reaction time. The Modal Slammer dismisses any modal in under 400 milliseconds, often before it has finished animating in.
Habitat
Anywhere your team has placed a modal in the user's path. Cookie banners. Feature announcements. Newsletter prompts especially.
Field notes
The Modal Slammer does not read the modal. Worse, it rarely even takes the modal into consideration. The naturalist has observed Slammers close, in succession, four overlays in a five-second window.
Resolution
The Slammer continues with their task, slightly more agitated. If the modal mattered, they would discover this later, often in a support ticket asking for the feature it had just announced.
Hazards observed
A modal placed at the worst moment in a flow. A re-onboarding message that fires on every login. A "We've updated our privacy policy" notice that distracts them from the task they wanted to complete.
If you spot one
A modal closed inside a second was never read, so the message is gone either way. The cost that lands is on the task it interrupted. Count the overlays a new user meets before their first real action in your product, because three is common. A Classifier scanner with freeform tags returns a ranked list of what people dismiss without reading. Read it as a list of things you made them close, and cut the one at the top.