About a month ago, Snap Preview was dodging a backlash to its suddenly-pervasive preview tool. Along with dozens of bloggers, I offered my assessment and promised to post a follow up with some solutions and approaches to using Snap Preview effectively.
In that time, Snap rounded up all the criticism, addressed it personally and delivered a thoughtful update to the product (twice) – largely making my intended follow-up obsolete.
Judging from comments on my last entry, the web-savvy individuals that contributed were largely unimpressed with what Snap Preview could provide and saw it as a superfluous nuisance. One of the two different Erik’s that posted a comment, made a good point in that the status bar already solves a lot of the problems that the Preview purports to solve (the ability to pre-qualify links prior to clicking on them). To that, I point to Apple’s Safari browser. There is a reason why Apple’s designers chose to ship Safari with the status bar disabled by default: for most people, the URL information is cryptic, non-essential and only confounds the decision making process.
Erik also added that a lot of indecisiveness could be resolved by using informative anchor text that provides context to the link. This mark of good web production is a luxury not afforded to the nature of modern content. With the barrier to content creation lower than ever before, masses of new information are being stitched together in blog posts, comments and social apps. There isn’t a long-established tradition of online content publishing to help regular individuals understand the value of crafting anchor text. But as the web standards movement showed us, a cultural change is not impossible, as long as people remain vocal about it. To that, I will add my contribution in bold: Snap Preview Anywhere is not a substitute for poorly formed anchor text.
Among his other good points, Jonathan Nicol also contributed this interesting observation:
It is distracting to wait a second for a preview image to load, look at and absorb the image information. In other words, it slows me down.
The Snap Preview can be quite jarring, especially when activated accidently. The accidental activation problem was nicely tackled with the introduction of the Snap Link Icon. Instead of having the entire link trigger a Snap Preview, it would only be activated by hovering over a small icon next to every Snap-enabled link. This also acts as a nice extension of a design pattern in which external links are denoted with a presence of a small icon appended to them, creating a distinct, scanable distinction between external and internal links. Unfortunately, this behavior is not one of the default settings when customizing the Snap Preview for a site. I would recommend choosing: Snap Link Icon: On & Trigger: Icon Only.
But even without accidental activation, it requires some effort and distracts from a more linear consumption of information – locate icon with your eyes, move your mouse, wait for the Preview to appear. However, most site visitors don’t consume content in a linear fashion, and the interaction of breaking from a logical flow is much more intuitive that it sounds. On sites where I am trying to digest a lot of information, great, give me more of it – but “new information, often” is not a primary objective of every site. A Techcrunch is meant to be consumed differently than a Daring Fireball. I will follow every link on Daring Fireball, whether I want to or not – and a preview will certainly slow me down in this case. Analogously, I don’t want a news ticker or graphical pop-ups annotating every scene when I’m watching Heroes; and I would feel similarly deprived if CNN was devoid of all graphics.
Another visitor, going by “Haarbal”, also offered his appraisal. Particularly, I identify with his sentiments that Snap Preview should be determined on a per-link basis. For me, examining the quality of each link is a pleasant thing to ponder about, but that necessitates a design decision for each link. Despite this, the latest version of the tool actually does a good job of solving this problem on the site-level, simply by adhering to one maxim. When Erik Wingren listed best practices in an exhaustive post on Snap’s blog, all of his real-world examples were external links and he explicitly dismissed the value of using it for internal links. It goes without saying: Snap Preview should only be used on external links. Further trivializing this follow-up post and adding weight to a site-level solution, he touched upon the two use patterns which I thought were best fit for the widget: external links in post content and the blogroll.
To top it off, in a move that fully subverted my efforts, Snap launched the “Snap Preview Anywhere Extreme Makeover Contest”. With a substantial cash prize, Digg-like voting model and a well-executed email marketing campaign, the crowdsourcing machinery has so far generated a good amount of interesting suggestions on how to improve the product. If anything, I’ll be taking the rest of my thoughts there, now that I have fulfilled my follow-up obligations.
