I just read an article giving 3 reasons why snap preview is ruining your blog, and hurting your readership.
- Accidental triggers: When scrolling and moving from one element of your site to another, the unintentional triggering of Snap preview is distracting at best. It draws attention away from your content and onto the mini preview image.
- Click stalling: When wanting to follow a link it’s often difficult to get the click to work. If it’s too hard to just click and go then it makes your site a difficult place to be, deffering people from returning.
- I trust you: If someone is at you’re site, chances are they already trust you. Do you really need to prove to them the validity of your link by offering a thumbnail image of it that they can’t even decipher anyway? Chances are you’relinking to a site for it’s content…right?
If you have a wordpress.com blog then the Snap Preview is turned on automatically. Please turn it off: Go to your Dashboard → Presentation → Extras → Un-check Enable Snap Preview… and click Update…
If you’ve installed Snap on your own website, first of all “Why?” and secondly, “Why?”
Esther said:
Sounds like someone is still grumpy about snap preview.
Posted on January 30, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Nathan said:
You really loathe this feature! Kinda like it myself! I see it as a way to preview a site before I decide to go there.
Posted on January 30, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Ronalfy said:
Shawn,
Snap preview is one of those features that are obtrusive to web users. I’m more for empowering web users and letting users of a site choose. It’s one thing to have a cool little feature that sits out of the way. It’s another thing to have something a user has no control over. If a user clicks over a link and something pops up, the user has no choice in the matter.
Posted on January 30, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Shawn said:
@ Esther: Sounds like someone is still secretly in love with Snap preview…
@ Nathan: I wholeheartedly agree that a site’s design is a huge feature that should not be overlooked, I haven’t once clicked on a link that I was not going to because the thumbnail preview looked enticing.
@ Ron: Come on brotha…let’s start a revolution!
Posted on January 30, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Ronalfy said:
@Shawn,
Let’s go!
Sometimes site owners need to stop thinking like webmasters and start thinking like users. Something like snap preview is cool for the first few times, but after that it’s kinda pointless.
I liken a new website feature to a new car. It looks cool and people will want to ride in it for a while. But after the initial popularity winds down, the car better be able to get you from point a to point b with little fuss.
Posted on January 30, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Jeff said:
Sounds like someone would make a great PC user…
Bah! Humbug! We don’t want blogs/websites to be fun. We want them practical… let’s put up another spreadsheet or sumpn.
Posted on January 30, 2007 at 10:22 pm
jen mcarthur said:
I totally share your dislike of snap… it’s quite annoying and really I feel it’s pointless. Like you said, you can’t even decipher the image that pops up anyways so what is the point really? I, for one, don’t understand it.
Posted on January 30, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Shawn said:
@ Jeff: Snap may be fun for some, but it seems the dominating factor is that it’s pointless… now if THAT’S not in the direction of PCs then I don’t know what is.
Posted on January 30, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Guy said:
You convinced me. I turned off my snap previews. Also, I recieved my blog post of the year swag in the mail yesterday. Thanks!
Posted on January 31, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Shawn said:
@ Guy: Yep yep. All in a days work…
Posted on January 31, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Evan Olsen said:
I dunno, I kind of like the snap preview. It’s kind of useful if you have a page with an image on it or something. But if it’s just an image of text then it’s pretty lame.
Posted on January 31, 2007 at 10:04 pm
sauna boy said:
I do like the snap preview. I find it useful
Posted on February 3, 2007 at 11:53 am
Jesse Gardner said:
Snap Preview is like a 2 minute startup sound for your computer. It’s fun the first two times. That’s about it.
Posted on March 7, 2007 at 7:40 am
Are You New to Blogging? | Fighting to Stay Awake said:
[…] Regarding Snap Preview […]
Posted on March 7, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Erik Wingren said:
My name is Erik Wingren and I head up UX Research for Snap.com — the company behind the Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA) service.
Obviously I have a bias on this topic… but here goes:
IMHO tech pundits such as Nick Wilson (who wrote the “3 reasons…” article) often fail to think outside of their personal frame of reference…
Snap Preview Anywhere has never claimed to provide *all* the information needed, but rather to provide richer-than-what-is-currently-available cues to what lies ahead.
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 if so, 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.
For a more in-depth analysis of SPA — both its strengths and weaknesses — you may also want to read our blog post The Snap Preview Anywhere Use Case.
Cheers.
–
Erik Wingren
Snap UX Research
Posted on March 7, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Jeff L. said:
I have to agree with Erik, I love snap and my readers do too. After a few tries you can actually move around the previews easily. What I have a problem with are websites that don’t open links in a new window. Everytime I click on a link and it takes me to a new page I don’t go back to the original page. Thanks for letting add my two cents.
Jeff
Posted on April 29, 2007 at 4:54 pm
{Shawn} said:
@ Jeff: Thanks for adding your twoo cents. It’s much appreciated.
If you and your readers like Snap then I guess more power to you.
Regarding links, I think there are two main reasons most site’s links don’t open up in a new window:
1. People may be un-familiar with the “no follow” tag.
2. The “no_follow” tag is not valid XHTML.
Posted on April 29, 2007 at 6:10 pm
idioleecofe said:
Very good contents…
http://danuegonax.com
Thanks much!
Posted on November 29, 2007 at 3:38 pm
idioleecofe said:
Good stuff, very nicely done!
http://srubibablo.com
I wish you health!
Posted on November 30, 2007 at 7:35 am