Interstitial, guidelines to use them without hassle on user experience

They are called interstitials and are dialog boxes or ads that are particularly invasive and annoying because they literally appear “in the middle” of a web page and hinder the user’s enjoyment of the content. Over the past few years we have become increasingly familiar with the term, included in the group of elements Google considered in its Page Experience Update, but it is probably worthwhile to delve deeper into what it means and what issues the presence of these interstitials on our pages can create, even in light of the crackdown launched by Google to benefit the user experience by also updating the guidelines for their proper use.

What are the interstitials

Literally, interstitial means “standing in the middle” of something; the adjective interstitial is used above all in the medical and scientific field to describe something “situated in the interstices between equal or analogous elements” like in the case of cells.

On the web, however, interstitial is an element of the page that hinders the display of content by users, usually for promotional purposes. In this sense, they have an effect similar to that of the dialogs, from which they differ, however, for the space occupied: the dialogs are overlays only on a part of the page (sometimes also obfuscating the underlying content), while interstitials overlap on the entire page and thus cover the main content that the user is interested in viewing.

Usually, interstitials are distinguished by the purpose of the advertisement, which can be informative or advertising. Informative interstitials are notices on cookies (which occupy a maximum of 20% of the screen and are mandatory by law), those that relate to any age limits imposed on the continuation of operations (purchase of alcohol, material related to s