Reading Alec’s blog, I saw a comment on his sweetly-titled post Snap.COM is EVIL and must DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE!!! from Eric Wingren, the head of Snap.com UX Research linking to their use case. I blogged about it here and was interested in what their rationale for the widget was. The blog is well written, the tone is fine but I still can’t find out why snap.com preview anywhere has been created. Perhaps I am slow of thinking but I cannot for the life of me work out why this is so essential/useful as to create a potentially major disruption for your readers!
- SPA can effectively establish the category of page you are linking to — a wiki looks very different than a product page.
- SPA is effective when you link to different articles
from the same source — differences (i.e. headlines and pictures) are
easier to perceive once within a repeating pattern (i.e page design). - SPA can be used effectively on blog rolls and text-heavy directory or results pages.
- SPA can tell the user if he/she has already read the linked content.
- SPA can tell the user if the link points to a trusted source.
- SPA can tell the user if the destination page requires registration.
- SPA can warn the user if the linked content is NSFW
- SPA can help fight link rot and reduce the number of trips to such pages.
My problem has been two fold then.
- Is the usefulness (that I can’t notice for myself but perhaps others can) sufficient to outweigh or justify adding something that users can’t control (at least initially) and is a major addition to look and functionality of the site.
- The difference between site/blog owners installing the widget thinking it’s a cool idea and the readers coming to the same conclusion. So the number of installs is not really a measure of usability and the widget’s success, but a measure of how many people like bells & whistles on their sites and/or feel experimental enough to install it.
Erik Wingren
on Feb 18th, 2007
@ 18:27 pm:
Adriana,
As a publisher you have a responsibility to your audience. If I was to attempt boiling down the science of audience research I would say this comes down to a combination of knowing who they are, what they want and what they need.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your audience *exclusively* made up of experienced Internet users that read your blog using browsers that support tabbed browsing (essentially IE7, Firefox, Opera or Safari)?
- Are you *not* interested in attracting and retaining readers that doesn’t fit this narrow user profile?
- Are your hyperlinks blue and underlined?
- Do you consistently follow “proper” markup protocol, defining the target and title of the link within the opening and closing of the anchor tag?
If so, your audience is likely to find the usefulness of SPA marginal. If so, your audience is trained to pick up on the subtle cues already provided by the browser framework — the browser status bar and anchor link title attribute provide these users with most of what they need to determine where links are pointing — and the cost of occasional erroneous clicks are often mitigated through the use of advanced browser functionality such as tabbed browsing…
However, if the user profile or markup principles described above are too narrow for your taste or ambition, I believe that by implementing Snap Preview Anywhere you would in fact offer ALL your readers MORE information to base their decision on which links to click or not to click, REDUCING the number of unwanted outbound clicks mid-read and, in effect, IMPROVE their ability to focus on YOUR content, or the content you link to that they TRULY wanted to visit.
I really appreciate the fact that you read up on the documentation and challenge the assumptions within. I hope the above will shed a little more light on the issues you raise. If not, I would be happy to continue the conversation here or there.
Cheers.
–
Erik Wingren
Snap UX Research
Perry de Havilland
on Feb 19th, 2007
@ 15:34 pm:
But the trouble is Erik that whilst their might be some truth to what you say about inexperienced web users, it is equally important to not annoy the experienced viewer by inflicting unwanted things on them that can obscure what you are looking at or trying to click on.
Erik Wingren
on Feb 19th, 2007
@ 19:31 pm:
@ Perry,
I completely agree.
Snap Preview Anywhere is not a back-end tweak. If you install SPA you should announce the new functionality to your readers. The announcement should include instructions how your visitors can disable the functionality if they don’t want it:
1. Click “Options” in the upper right corner of any preview bubble.
2. Click Disable (for the site in question or globally)
3. Reload the page — Done!
And for those who want to take an even more cautious approach, as of Friday Feb 9th, we offer an option that allow site owners to install SPA on their site but let the end-users enable the functionality themselves. Laughing Squid is an example of a site that implements Snap Previews in this way (look for the badge in the right side bar).
Cheers.
–
Erik Wingren
Snap UX Research