Barking in the dark

Bobbie Johnson in the Guardian's Technology supplement says Web 2.0 has given us all a voice, but suggests no-one is listening. Perhaps the start of a reassessment of social media - following on from Rich Skrenta's questioning of the success of news sites.

(Btw the same supplement suggests Snap Previews (which are enabled on here) are the most hated web 2.0 function. I rather like them. But if I'm alone in that I'll turn them off!)

Comments

[Erik Wingren]

Richard,

Tech pundits such as Charles Arthur of the Guardian, who critique Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA) on the basis of usefulness, either fail to think outside of their personal frame of reference or they are essentially expressing a lack of interest in the less tech savvy.

SPA 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 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 discussion of SPA — both its strengths and weaknesses — you might also visit our blog post The Snap Preview Anywhere Use Case on the following link:
http://blog.snap.com/2007/02/09/spa-use-case/

Cheers.
–
Erik Wingren
Snap UX Research

[Charles]

Blimey, I'm following Erik around. He's made exactly the same comment at http://sensitivitytothings.com/2007/02/23/snapped/

So my remarks there will serve for here. I'm reflecting peoples' opinions. If all I came across was love for Snap, we'd be having an entirely different discussion.

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