A little background for those of you who just tuned in… On Tuesday, November 14, 2006, Snap launched a new web service that enables the display of a graphic preview for literally any link anywhere. The service is called Snap Preview Anywhere™, or "SPA" for short.

Snap Preview Anywhere has taken off like a rocket — since launch some 700K web sites and blogs have signed up for the service and some 180MM previews have been served.

Given its explosive growth, it is hardly a surprise that Snap Preview Anywhere, in the past couple of weeks, has come under fire from a number of blogosphere pundits — primarily calling the usability and the end-user benefit of the Snap Preview Anywhere web service into question.

In this article I will reiterate Snap's intentions and design objectives in developing SPA, acknowledge and respond to the key points in the recent criticism and outline recent usability enhancements, aimed at solving the issues raised.

The purpose of this post is threefold:

1. To reiterate Snap's intentions and design objectives in developing SPA.
2. To acknowledge and respond to the key points in the recent criticism of SPA.
3. To outline recent usability enhancements of SPA, aimed at solving the issues raised.

The Snap Preview Anywhere Use Case

Usefulness is a subjective measure, highly impacted by the context in which a functionality is used as well as the behavior and experience of the individual user. When I use the term "useful" I do so in reference to "the majority of users".

Snap is first and foremost a Search Engine. Our mission is to help people find what they are looking for faster. Through the many iterations of the Snap.com UI we have found that traditional text results, as succinct (and familiar) as they are, become dramatically more useful alongside some sort of visualization of the destination content.

The Snap Preview Anywhere service was designed to help users make more informed decisions about what links to click on and thereby help them navigate the Internet with greater speed and accuracy.

As a user, whether you know and trust the author's linking or not, every time you click a link you have in fact gone through an evaluation process for that specific click. The Snap Preview Anywhere functionality is intended to assist users in that evaluation.

To the experienced Internet user, this evaluation process is a barely conscious activity — the browser status bar and title attribute have a lot more "scent" to him/her than to the average user — and the cost of erroneous clicks are often mitigated through the use of advanced browser functionality such as tabbed browsing.

Therefore: As a publisher, by installing SPA you 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. A satisfied user is more likely to come back.

Naturally, the trusted old design idiom — context matters — always applies. There are good ways to use SPA and there are bad ways to use SPA.

Best practices for implementing Snap Preview Anywhere include:

• SPA is not a back-end tweak. If you install SPA you should announce the new functionality to your readers. The announcement should include instructions on how your visitors can disable the functionality if they don't want it.
• SPA is most effective on external links. Internal links often look just like the one you are linking from and the cognitive value of the preview is therefore marginalized on such links.
• SPA can effectively establish the category of page you are linking to — a wiki looks very different than a product page.
• SPA is effective when you link to different articles from the same source — differences (i.e. headlines and pictures) are easier to perceive once within a repeating pattern (i.e page design).
• SPA can be used effectively on blog rolls and text-heavy directory or results pages.
• SPA can tell the user if he/she has already read the linked content.
• SPA can tell the user if the link points to a trusted source.
• SPA can tell the user if the destination page requires registration.
• SPA can warn the user if the linked content is NSFW ;)
• SPA can help fight link rot and reduce the number of trips to such pages.
• Please feel free to add more good/bad uses for SPA in the comments…

Critique of Snap Preview Anywhere

Credit should be given where credit is due: Knowingly or not, the following blogs, authors and reader commentary has helped inform the ongoing development of the Snap Preview Anywhere web service by evaluating the functionality:

500 Hats · Adactio · Alex King · Bin-Blog · Everything Internet Blog · ZDNet Web 2.0 Explorer · Ephram Zerb · Jarkolicious · Digital Inspiration · Lorelle on Wordpress · Moeffju · Nitin's World · Open… · Performancing · Rc3 · Scripting News · Unraveled · Aidanf · The Blog Herald · Darren Barefoot · DevTao · Hands On Experince · IndianPod · Instigator Blog · John Chow Dot Com · Marketing Pilgrim · One Digital Life · Pro Blogger · Read/Write Web · reveNEWS · TechCrunch · UX Magazine · Voodoo Ventures

The critique of Snap Preview Anywhere boils down to 4 points:

1. Thumbnail sized graphic previews are not useful.
My first response to this point is a question: Useful for whom? I addressed the context- and user variables of this equation earlier on in this post so I won't over that again.

On one hand this is the most common objection. On the other hand, it seems to be a true "chasm issue" — you either get it or you don't.

We certainly have the ability and means to make the previews larger but we have so far not been able to validate the yield in usefulness against the additional amount of "original content" that would be obscured on activation or the additional bytes that would have to travel down the "tubes".

For the readers of this blog who find the graphic previews less useful, I wanted to point out that we are actively soliciting ideas on what other types of look-before-you-leap-information would help you navigate with greater speed and accuracy — please feel free to add your $0.02 in the comments.

2. The functionality breaks established conventions of online interaction.
I think the best articulations of this came from Jeremy Keith @ Adactio and Ivan Kanevski @ Ephram Zerb…

Jeremy Keith: If I click on a link, I am initiating an action. If I fill in a form and press a submit button, I am initiating an action. But if I move my mouse over a page element, I am not initiating an action…

Ivan Kanevski: When I view a website, I leave my mouse stationary and use the scroll wheel. Each link that has Snap Preview makes the vertical area above and below it a hazard for accidental activation. Forcing me to find a gutter in the content to place my mouse cursor. Illustration

Jeremy, Ivan and everyone else who brought up similar points: We hear you loud and clear. See "Surprise Surprise" and "Accidental Triggers" in "Usability Issues and Solutions".

3. The functionality is forced on users.
Most of this criticism came around the time of the Wordpress.com trial and subsequent roll-out:

• After requests from their members, Wordpress.com enrolls 10% of their population for a SPA trial. The response was overwhelmingly positive: Snap to it!, Dec 29, 2006
• Wordpress makes Snap Preview Anywhere available to all their blog-owners. Again, the accolades seem never ending: Snap Live, Jan 13, 2007

That being said, some end-users simply do not want preview functionality and object to even the most easy opt-out type interaction. While I think it is somewhat narrow minded to interpret this as "forced functionality" (site owners make decision on behalf of their users every time they update their pages), I respect site owners and end-users who advocate a more cautious approach. We are meeting these requests — see "Opt-in vs. Opt-out" in "Usability Issues and Solutions" below.

4. Snap Preview Anywhere adds to page load time.
Yes, SPA adds to your page load. Some of it due to the (relatively light) weight of the script and some of it due to the extra hop from our servers. At this early stage in the game we are still releasing weekly updates but we are exploring implementations that would let site owners store the script on their end without making pushing updates a too complicated affair.

The anti-widget sentiment is a natural reaction in a time where online publishing and use of web services no longer is an exclusive activity of the digerati.

Usability Issues and Solutions

The product design process at Snap is very iterative. I can't go into detail on everything we have on the drawing-boards but I wanted to share the following list of enhancements since they are relevant to the recent discussion about SPA's usability. Please do not interpret this as the be-all and end-all of our usability ambitions.

Surprise Surprise
The Issue: For better or worse we made the decision to, by default, minimize our footprint in the original design of the pages where SPA is installed. The upside is that site owners can install the functionality with a minimal effort and then "tune" according to their preferences. The downside is that there by default are no visual cues to tell the end-user which links are SPA-enabled and which ones are not. This in turn causes a potential "element of surprise" when rolling over a link that is enabled, or "perceived inconsistency" when rolling one that isn't.
The Solution: As you can see on our blog we just implemented an enhancement which add an icon to SPA-enabled links. This update was released today, Friday Feb 9th. Check out early adopters TechCrunch, Emily Chang and Jarkolicious.

Accidental Triggers
The Issue: With the default implementation of SPA the previews bubble will trigger on mouseover of a text link. A user moving their cursor across a page with SPA-enabled links may accidently trigger the functionality.
The Solutions: A number of fixes have been, or are just about to be, released…

• On Jan 11th we released an update that added an "Options" menu on each preview bubble. Apart from allowing end-users to disable the functionality all together, this menu allows the end-user to set the hover delay before the preview bubble appears (e.g. users who thinks the bubble appears to quickly can increase the delay).
• On Feb 2nd we released an under-the-hood update that disables the preview functionality while the mouse-wheel is in use.
• In addition to the link icons described above, today's release also enables site owners to define what part of the link should trigger the preview bubble:
  1. Text only: example link
  2. Text & icon: example link
  3. Icon only: example link

Opt-out vs. Opt-in
The Issue: In its default implementation, SPA ties new functionality to one of the oldest conventions on the Internet — the text hyperlink. Some users simply do not want the functionality and object to even the most easy opt-out type interaction.
The Solution: Today, Friday Feb 9th, we released the Snap Preview Anywhere badge, which will allow site owners to install SPA on their site but let the end-users enable (opt-in) the functionality themselves.

A Call to Continued Dialogue

Snap appreciates and actively seek out constructive criticism. This is how we learn and develop. I am personally in awe by the number of very smart people who have taken the time to evaluate our service and offer their take on it, quite a few with detail and articulation.

Snap is committed to developing innovative products and services that are useful to both publishers and end-users. The product design process at Snap is iterative in nature and centered around dialogue with users.

In other words: I sincerely hope that users of SPA will continue to share their feedback as the technology evolves. And we want to engage more directly with the users who we are currently failing to serve.

–
Erik Wingren
Snap UX Research
erik[at]snap[dot]com