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If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and "play" icon, would this be okay? The video that follows you down the page is tryin

If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and "play" icon, would this be okay? The video that follows you down the page is trying to help you, not annoy you. It gives you the chance to read the article while having the vision there too. It's only a problem if the video autoplays, which unfortunately is all of the time on all sites that do this.

JoshTriplett 9y ago
> If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and "play" icon, would this be okay? Absolutely not. If the video is useful content, put it front and center, and let the user hit "play" on it; if they scroll it away, accept that they don't want it. If it's unrelated content (as with the thousands of "news" sites that want to autoplay an unrelated "hey look at this completely unrelated garbage" video), put it under a "related stories" column or similar, and stop making it jump around the page to draw attention. The user is already on the page they wanted, their attention is exactly where they want it to be, and your job is to serve them what they want, not what you want. "Engagement" might be easy to measure (hey look, if we pester the hell out of users we get a few more users who accidentally watched the video), but the much better metric for long-term sustainability is "how many users love your site and think 'this is awesome'".
dylan-m 9y ago
> It gives you the chance to read the article while having the vision there too. That is not a thing that an actual human is capable of doing. A human has two eyes which must be fixed in the same general direction, and one brain. As convenient as it would be for some interface designers, humans are not octopuses. The cocktail party effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect) is a useful thing to keep in mind when considering the limits of peoples' awareness. It happens for a reason. You may think you can read an article and watch a video at the same time, but the fact is, no, you cannot. One of the two things is making it very hard to focus on the other.
tripzilch 9y ago
There's literally nothing I've ever lost by blocking any element that follows me down the page, ever. Video or not.

JoshTriplett 9y ago

> If the video follows you down the page in a paused state, with thumbnail and "play" icon, would this be okay? Absolutely not. If the video is useful content, put it front and center, and let the user hit "play" on it; if they scroll it away, accept that they don't want it. If it's unrelated content (as with the thousands of "news" sites that want to autoplay an unrelated "hey look at this completely unrelated garbage" video), put it under a "related stories" column or similar, and stop making it jump around the page to draw attention. The user is already on the page they wanted, their attention is exactly where they want it to be, and your job is to serve them what they want, not what you want. "Engagement" might be easy to measure (hey look, if we pester the hell out of users we get a few more users who accidentally watched the video), but the much better metric for long-term sustainability is "how many users love your site and think 'this is awesome'".

dylan-m 9y ago

> It gives you the chance to read the article while having the vision there too. That is not a thing that an actual human is capable of doing. A human has two eyes which must be fixed in the same general direction, and one brain. As convenient as it would be for some interface designers, humans are not octopuses. The cocktail party effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect) is a useful thing to keep in mind when considering the limits of peoples' awareness. It happens for a reason. You may think you can read an article and watch a video at the same time, but the fact is, no, you cannot. One of the two things is making it very hard to focus on the other.

tripzilch 9y ago

There's literally nothing I've ever lost by blocking any element that follows me down the page, ever. Video or not.