Lightbox UIs are becoming a lot more prevalent in mainstream web-design. You know the drill -- click on a link, the background fades darker, and up pops a UI for interacting with an object, making a change, viewing a picture gallery etc.
They do make it very obvious what is going on, and where the user's focus is to be at any one point in the experience. However, they often don't allow the user to open images or perform that task in a new browser tab, for example, which can frustrate many.
There seems to be a bit of a resistance by some well known web software developers:
So, has anyone done any user testing/usability tests with lightbox UIs, and how did they perform? What are the pitfalls? Where do they do well? Where do they do poorly?
Edit: I saw an interesting use of a lightbox the other day, shopping for car insurance. I thought it worked quite well -- you select additional options on the page for adding things like breakdown cover to the base policy, click update, and the lightbox faded in and showed the progress of the update. Neat, direct, obvious what was happening.
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