Thoughts on Services Like Snap
Jens Meiert, December 2, 2007 / March 7, 2008.
This entry is filed under Usability, User Experience.
Preview services like Snap appear to help only a few people, and there seems to be a handful of good though linked reasons not to use them at all:
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Snap and similar “screenshot thumbnail” services regularly get in the way. How often are people hindered due to these “flyouts” or whatever, being forced to waste time? Any decent usability test will prove that Snap does not mean
more fun and interactive experience
like it claims, not for users: While Snap and its sympathizers probably share joy and bank account experience, users will rather be driven away due to the negative experience they make. -
Hypertext doesn’t really work this way. Eventually I fail in clearly communicating the argument here, but if previews for hyperlinks were so crucial they would probably be supported natively in any browser (or we should consider adding this support). Maybe that’s due to the fact – usability again – that the performance of clicking a link and pressing “back” is much better than hovering a link, trying to figure out what’s on that tiny image or text snippet, then deciding to either get rid of the whatever or to press any link.
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You might make more money with more useful and more credible advertisement like Google AdSense, for example (no matter that Snap also shows Google ads).
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Snap adds about 10 KB to every document where it is used and thus means 1 second more load time on a 56 Kbit/s connection. This might not sound that important but it is, especially when its use appears “questionable” as outlined above.
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This is a rare case, but Snap & Co. can compromise the print version of pages where they’re active. It’s certainly not Snap’s responsibility that sites offer at least decent print styles, but it must not mean more work and/or lower quality (again), either.
Anyway, that quick collection of some thoughts rather incidentally targets Snap – no other comparable service appears to be so popular. Looks like for website owners, “less is more” holds true again.
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Comments
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On December 2, 21:46 CET, Erik Wingren said:
Jens,
My name is Erik Wingren and I head up UX Research for Snap.com – the company behind the Snap Shots web service.
First, for the benefit of your readers, that are not yet familiar with Snap Shots, let me clear up some common misconceptions:
1. Snap Shots offer a lot more than just “screenshot thumbnails”.
2. Snap Shots add about 4kb to the *initial page load on the site*. After that the script is cached.Second, let’s discuss the basis for your hypothesis. You write:
Preview services like Snap appear to help only a few people…
I think you are wrong. I believe the people who react negatively to Snap Shots represent a small slice of online population who fail to think outside their own frame of reference.
When you (or I for matter) roll over links — that often are not blue nor underlined, are not particularly well defined within the opening and closing of the anchor tag and do not include the title attribute — you have been trained to glance down at the browser status bar, parse the URL visually in a blink of a second, and hedge your bets by opening the links in a new tab.
*This is not the case for most users*. As a matter of fact, the Safari browser ships with the status bar and tabbed browsing disabled by default…
I state that Snap Shots is a timely attempt to evolve the hyperlink, for everyone, in a time when online publishing is no longer an exclusive activity of the technorati elite.
Snap Shots address a user need. If it wasn’t, how come some 2M site owners have added Snap Shots to their sites? How come some 2,500 end-users download and install the Snap Shots browser add-on every day, so they can bring the functionality with them to sites like Google, Amazon and YouTube?
That being said, we are committed to making Snap Shots *more useful for more people*, so if you have suggestions for how to improve the experience, we are all ears.
I would be more than happy to show you all the features and configuration options available and to discuss this 1-on-1 or anywhere/anyhow you like.
Best Regards,
–
Erik Wingren
Snap UX Research
erik.at.snap.dot.com -
On December 4, 12:37 CET, Jens Meiert said:
Hi Erik, thank you very much for the detailed feedback, I really appreciate that!
For now and since I gladly received feedback from Seth Wagoner (Interclue), too, I may just add that concerning Snap script size, I formerly tested a few sites, including Guy Kawasaki’s, and observed an average 10 KB script size – which can but does not need to be cached.
I’ll certainly take another look at Snap and its configuration though.
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On December 8, 17:02 CET, marcus said:
erik, i agree with all of your points made. though i initially thought that snap is a pretty neat idea it just got very annoying in the end the more sites using that thing.
as you said — it gets in the way. literaly.
i usually figure out if a link »is worth« clicking by looking up the destination in my status bar (safari) while hovering the »a« element.
cheers, m
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On December 17, 20:24 CET, Rebecca Beisly said:
Incidentally, I’ve never used these services, but I think I understand what you’re writing about.
However, I THINK I disagree with one point you made. I personally would NOT prefer to click a link to see where it takes me, and then press “back” if I find I wasn’t interested. I’d rather hover on a link to see what information it holds and make a decision based on that. And I’m annoyed if hovering on a link provides no clues. And, if no info pops up when I hover, I will glance down to my status bar, hoping to find it there. If I still have no info but am still curious enough, I’ll right-click and open the link in another tab or window (something the Snap commenter mentioned, although I think I missed his point there.)
HOWEVER, what I do NOT like (and I THINK this is what you also don’t like about Snap-type services) is when that little bit of info pops up on its own, when my cursor just happens to pass over a link or a picture. When they do this, it’s never tiny bits of info that they’ve embedded into these links or pictures for me to see when I pass over them; sometimes it’s so much info that it blocks out a large part of the page. This would be the page that I’m TRYING to read, of course. Hard to do with these things popping up everywhere your cursor points. I’d rather not be forced to take special care as to where my cursor is as I scan a webpage, just to avoid these popups.
But this is happening more and more, and this is without the use of Snap-type services. As I said, I’ve not used them, so I’m not entirely clear on their concept, but I gather that this is one of the things you get if you do use them. And if so, I don’t think I’ll be using them.
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On December 18, 19:40 CET, Seth Wagoner said:
Just a quick note on some things our Interclue Firefox Extension shows in link previews that you can’t get just from looking at the status bar (and in the case of many of these features, any of the other link preview systems I know about)
If it’s a link to an image: Interclue grabs it and show it the tooltip if it’s below a certain size, otherwise shows the user the size and gets them to confirm.
If it’s a link to an MP3 or MOV we pop up a player for the user in the tooltip.
If it’s a link to some other sort of binary file, we show the file size and publication date (fetched via an HTTP HEAD request)
If it’s a link to a .txt file we show the text nicely formatted in a scrolling div, in the tooltip.
If it’s a link to an ordinary HTML page, Interclue downloads just the HTML, scrapes it for the most significant blocks of text and shows those in the tooltip (this is our most impressive and useful trick)
If the URL returns an error, we provide quick links to major internet archives like Google Cache so you can go hunting for it.
Because the interaction is completely under user control (and I mean completely - there are just over 100 options), most people find they can set up Interclue so they get rapid previewing without accidental activation, and so that it works within any hardware and network limitations they might have.
If 100 options sounds like too many, we have a “Quick, answer these 3 multi-choice questions” panel to help set the most important ones.
So if you’re using Firefox Rebecca, give Interclue a go and see if you like it. If not, you can sign up at the site to be notified when other browser versions are available.
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On December 21, 13:55 CET, Jens Meiert said:
Marcus, Rebecca, thank you – excellent points!
Seth, some of the features of Interclue remind me of some issues Nielsen listed when it comes to search engines … as a content provider one probably doesn’t “enjoy” it when search engines and specific software “steals” visitors by showing all content upfront. But probably I misunderstood you here, and like I wrote to you before, I’ll gladly take a closer look at Interclue.
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On December 27, 5:47 CET, FifthE1ement said:
I used to use Snap.com’s services but now they are implementing their own ad system into the code, which I will not stand for. I have terminated my use of the service and I have also encouraged many others to do so as well. Until the option for disabling the ads appears I will not go back to your so called, “FREE” service. I do not have ads on my site and I’m not going to have them snuck onto it by your service no less. Man just another great idea destroyed by money.
Delete your SNAP accounts today and show them that we will not stand for this! Remove the ads or we’ll remove you!
FifthE1ement
