A WordPress feature which is enabled by default is the preview of the destination of links, which is displayed when you move the mouse over hyperlink. This feature, which is illustrated in the screen shot, is provided by Snap.
That’s cool, I thought when I first came across this. And I still find it useful: I get a feel for the destination of a link before clicking and waiting for the page to be retrieved. However a couple of people have commented on this blog that they don’t like Snap. And on 22 February 2007 the Guardian’s Online supplement featured an article entitled Is Snap Preview the most hated Web 2.0 function ever? The following week the letters page contained several letters in agreement with this sentiment, with just one, from the director of Snap, which sought to make a case for Snap.
I’ve argued previously about the benefits of giving users options to choose their preferred settings, rather than the the service provider making the choice on behalf of the user community. So how should I resolve this dilemma? It does seem to me that the Snap facility does allow the user to select various configuration options (the time before the popup display occurs, its size; etc.). In addition Snap can easily be disabled by clicking on the clearly marked Disable option. So users do have choice. But if I were to disable this feature on the blog (as I am able to do) wouldn’t I be removing choice from the users?
What should I do? Do I respond to the loudest voice? Or the largest numbers (and maybe persecute a minority)? Is there a fair and equitable solution?
Personally, I hate Snap Preview and I feel it can cause problems with accessibility, although I don’t have any data to support that view yet.
My real beef though is with wordpress.com which enabled Snap Preview as the default on all blogs, INCLUDING EXISTING ONES. This is very bad behavior and damages user confidence. The correct thing to do of course would have been to make it available to users but with the default setting as off, and certainly not to piss off longstanding bloggers who don’t want it.
TURN IT OFF BRIAN!!!
(loud enough?)
I am not a fan, but there is a little middle ground:
“As great as Snap Previews are, not everyone wants one every time they mouseover a link. So, we’re now adding Snap Link Icons, a tiny bubble icon that appears next to a link to show that it has a preview. At your discretion, you can even change your settings so that only the icon triggers a preview.”
If the minor annoyance of email must die, the huge annoying intrusion of Snap Preview must die… horribly.
Bogus dilemma, Brian. If you have lots of blinking text on your page, but present users with a “disable” button, are you giving users “choice” and therefore more user-focused than a site which doesn’t use blink? No, you’d just be requiring all but the most perverse of your users make an unnecessary click.
I’ve also been through the process of opening a WordPress.com blog, thinking that Snap Preview Anywhere is cool, then realising that it’s not and disabling it. Sane options for providing thumbnail previews of web sites are discussed in a post on the new Ancient Geeks blog (for techies supporting UK Higher Education).
The ‘disable’ option has never worked for me, and it often gets in the way of the normal functionality of my browser (e.g. mousing over a link to see the URL it’s pointing to). And I agree that they handled it badly by putting it on y default on WordPress blogs.
I’m not convinced that Snap Preview offers any useful information about the destination of a link beyond the layout of the destination page; the preview image is small enough that it’s hard even to make out the headline of the linked page. As such, I find it a nuisance.
There’s also the issue of loss of control, both of the writer and the reader, and here it’s useful to compare it to other systems which have augmented the content of a page: Microsoft Smart Tags, and Kontera ContentLink. In both cases, the reader is presented with extra material in a document which has not necessarily been sanctioned by the author of the page, and which the reader is unable to remove. The popups used by ContentLink and Snap Preview are particularly irritating in this fashion, because they change the common browsing paradigm by carrying out actions on mouseover, rather than on a button press.
The irony is that I consider myself an advocate of open hypermedia, and these three systems are all essentially open hypermedia systems, in that they annotate documents with extra links…
Hi guys
It’s the first time I’ve seen the Snap feature and I quite like have a preview, though I’m sure I’ll get tired of it before long… I agree that they don’t provide much extra information beyond the appearance of the destination page, though this could be useful if the user wan’t sure if they had been there before. For the fickle user, it may help them choose which links to follow based on the attractiveness of the page!
Hi all – many thanks for your comments.
Martin’s post on the AncientGeeks blog entitled Thumbnail previews of web sites: an overview was very interesting, with a useful summary of the benefits of Web page previews. And it was interesting to see Dan Brickley joining in the discussion – his comments reminded me that me (staff at UKOLN and ILRT) had discussions on this topic many years ago, when we suggested the end user benefits of pop-ups of Web resource metadata, which could include a visualisation of the page. It seems to me that the ideas we had several year’s ago have come to fruition. And looking at the announcement of the Snap preview facility on the WordPress blog, many of the 468 comments liked the feature (and many didn’t).
So there are clearly mixed opionions of the feature (unlike the comparison suggested by Martin, as there is no evidence to suggest that users want blinking text). However if you don’t like it, it is easy to disable, but if it was removed it would not be easy to recreate the feature. So from a user-centred approach the facility should stay, I would argue.