You are currently viewing an archive of this site. To view new content and see what I’ve been up to lately please check the main page at http://www.aidanf.net
Subscribe
Reasons not to use Snap Preview
Posted January 24, 2007I’ve noticed that more and more sites are adopting Snap Preview. This is a service that provides a graphical preview of a site in a popup when you hover over a link. I find these popups annoying but beyond my annoyance there are no good reasons to use Snap preview and several usability and accessibility not to use it.
Snap Preview - what is it?
Snap preview is a service that provides graphical previews of links. When a user hovers over a link a popup window appears with a preview image of the page that the link points to. You can see an example here. The picture below shows an example.
Why use it?
From the Snap faq:
Q: Why should I use Snap Preview Anywhere on my site or blog? A: Snap Preview Anywhere makes it easier for people to know where they’re going when they click on a link. Your site becomes easy to navigate. And if the link doesn’t go where they want, they’ll know before they leave. Besides, Snap Preview Anywhere is cool!
I can’t think of any reason to use Snap preview. It looks kinda cool but it doesn’t serve any useful function. It certainly doesn’t make your site easier to navigate and it doesn’t provide enough information in the preview to be useful.
What do you gain by using Snap preview? The preview itself doesn’t provide enough information for a user to decide if they want to follow a link. The text is too small to read so you can’t see any of the content of the site in the preview. All you get to see is the template that the site uses. This information is not enough to decide if a link is interesting enough to follow. It may be useful for linking to images but not for text-based sites. So the upside to using Snap preview is a cool popup effect and a preview of the design template that the site uses. So the benefits to your site of using Snap preview are small.
What is the downside to using Snap preview and does it outweigh the benefits?
Ask yourself whether adding Snap preview to your site will benefit your users more than it annoys them. Here are some of the disadvantages of using it.
- It slows down your site. For a user on a slow connection the previews can be slow to load. While they are loading the preview window is blocking out content on your site. It also adds extra javascript to your pages which must then be loaded from an external server.
- It blocks out content on your site. When the preview loads it blocks out a large section of your site. This is very annoying if you’re not expecting it. When the preview pops up, the user stops focusing on your content and is forced to focus on the preview. Sometimes when I’m reading I’ll hover over a link to see the url that it points to. With Snap preview this results in a popup that blocks the text I was reading.
- It introduces unexpected behaviour to the user interface. Moving your mouse should not cause little preview windows to popup. This goes against the default expected behaviour when browsing. Users expect to click the mouse to make new things happen. Moving the mouse should not have these kinds of side-effects.
- It doesn’t give useful information about the link. Your link text is a much more useful way to provide information about the site you are linking to. The small graphic view of the site doesn’t transmit any information other than the layout of the site and the design template it uses.
- It seriously affects accessibility for the disabled. See Lorelle for examples.
- It may irritate your users. Some users don’t like popups - especially unexpected popups.
After considering the pros and cons I suggest that Snap preview is a bit of a gimmick and that the disadvantages of using it far outweigh the benefits. I’m surprised so many sites have adopted it so quickly. You should give serious consideration to whether its worth it before you adopt something that so drastically alters the user interface to your site.
How to switch it off
If your are running Snap preview on your site, consider disabling it for the reasons outlined above. As a user, if you find it annoying you can switch it off at the Snap website. This sets a cookie in your browser and if the cookie is present the Snap previews won’t appear.
Thanks! Thanks! Thanks! I tough that I was the only one getting sick of the useless popups jumping just on hoover, it is great it can be disabled in a centralized way.
Good post. I like the option to shut off and thanks for pointing that out. Your caption is from my site and I'll post how to shut it off with the cookie.
Wonder if I can write a script to automatically set it for users...any thoughts on that?
I added the "on/off" button to my blog. Thanks for pointing that out...
Hi Joel, hope you don’t mind me using your site as an example:)
I’m not sure what you mean by “write a script to automatically set it for users”. You can link directly to the disable action. Similarly if the user has disables Snap Preview you can link directly to the enable action. I guess you could write a script that checks for the presence of the cookie and then prints either the enable or disable link depending on whether it finds it or not.
Thanks for the disable tip, Aidan.
Thanks for sharing this perspective. When I saw the snap preview feature, my first instinct was to go out and find the code so I could do it myself. After reading your thoughts, I realized that I would just be using the feature for its own sake and not really for that of my users. Thanks for reminding us that usability and real value add must always remain the primary considerations in designing an interface.
Thanks for a great post on the topic of SPA feature. I recently wrote a piece on the topic myself and has since turned it off on all my sites (contrary to my initial post where I somewhat doubtfully left the feature implemented). I won't leave a comment without adding something useful to the discussion so I'd also like to bring to light that having SPA on your site greatly hampers usability from a mobile standpoint. I normally use my trusty Sony Ericsson M600i phone to read various blogs and such to and from work (using Opera as well as the built-in browser), and trying to make sense of a site using SPA from a mobile device is a nightmare. Not to mention the extra precious Bytes of data it produces to no particular use. I'm not cheap, don't get me wrong, but mobile data is more expensive than the old broadband sitting home.