Cookie consent banners are utter nonsense!

Do you even care when you click Agree on the cookie consent bar? Do you even know what that means for you or what the hell are they for? Are you just trying to get rid of them to go to the intended website without distraction?

As much as they were intended to give some knowledge to end-users, they became just a sign of frustration and pointless exercise.

If you are living in the UK you used (or are still using) the NHS website to report your COVID-19 test result.

This NHS website is a great example of how cookie bar is total nonsense and the web developers who implement that shall get a medal for pissing off its users.

Without going into the aspect of what happens when we click Accept on cookie consent banners, or what shall happen when we don’t, as well as what are cookies after all, here is how frustrated for its users they can be.

So, you want to report your result of the COVID-19 test.

You are heading to www.gov.uk/report-covid19-result

The majority of people will do this on their mobile devices, so the first thing we see is a cookies consent banner on half of the website.

Let’s click Accept to get rid of it.

Sadly, we cannot get rid of it with just one click, as it informs you about your decision, so you need to click the Hide button to get rid of it.

One-click too much.

Then you are trying to do what you intended to. So you click the Start now button.

And what happens in the next stage? Another Cookie Consent Banner to accept before you can sign in (or not) into your NHS account.

Once again you need to click Accept and again Hide to get rid of it altogether. This time the UI is inconsistent with the previous page as the Hide button is not the same.

Another distraction.

You decided to sign in and what? You land on another page with another cookie content bar, once again taking half of the screen.

On the first, I may be interested in what is all about. On the second I am a little annoyed, so I am clicking accept again. For the third time, I am frustrated that I need to do this once again! At this stage, I don’t care what is that. This banner can even tell me that I won £1m and I wouldn’t care. Clicking Accept once again.

Another inconsistent UI, as this time I don’t have a button to hide my consent after I click Accept, but I am just informed about my decision.

The cookie bar shall simply go away, not bother you like a ghost on the website. Pathetic.

I get it, in between the first step, logging in, and on the end, reporting my result, I am passed through different servers and different domains, but seriously, the sense of the cookie consent banner losing the point.

If you visited my website for the first time you will also notice the cookie consent banner on the bottom of the page. I don’t know if I fully need it or not. As I am using analytics to track who is visiting my website, this is probably leaving some crumbs on your machine, hence probably need it.

I am not giving you a choice to accept that or reject, as I don’t have control over it. Take it or not, but if you want to accept it, or rather get rid of it, you need to hit this button there.

Does any of you even read my cookie consent page? I doubt.

I wish, when all browsers will block cross-tracking cookies, that this nonsense will disappear from web development. Sadly I am full of doubt about that.

The worse thing is that all these banners are harming users. Putting distractions and slowing down websites. You can implement a cookie consent bar that won’t have a negative impact on the core web vitals of your website, but will you?

The majority of websites use ready-made solutions that don’t care about your website performance.

When users stop caring about cookies, especially when web browsers like Microsoft Edge and Safari are doing their bits to protect them, I don’t see the point of having it.

Sadly, especially on big brands’ websites, earning a lot through them, they will still prefer to have it in place instead of risking being sued.

I am removing the banner from my website and other private sites, living a link to the cookie content page. If I am getting annoyed about them, I don’t want to annoy users who are visiting my website. Overall I don’t care about cookies and don’t think you are (in a matter of consent banner, not these that can be stolen by advertising companies to target you).

Of course, to sleep well, commercial websites that I made will still carry with this nonsense until there is industry-wide change and understanding that cookie consent banners are utter nonsense.