Tom Murphy writes:
I really don’t like this new fashion for Snap previews.
What’s the value? I can see what the linked web page looks like? But I’m clicking for content not eye candy (from blogs in any case), and those pop ups are driving me mad.
If you haven’t seen them, check out John Batelle’s Doodlebuy. They’re basically little bubbles that pop up when you mouse over a link.
In evaluating these badboys, we can ask a very simple question: is the added value of previewing the destination page worth the distraction of the popup?
I may be a curmudgeonly old computer user, but for me the answer is no. 90% of the time, I know where I’m going before I click a link (I should know 100% of the time if you believe Jakob Neilsen). On Doodlebuy, for example, the Snap-enabled links read “Click here to go to Amazon.com”. That pretty much makes the preview moot, doesn’t it?
For the other 10% of the time, Snap will only help if I recognize the destination site in the mini preview. The odds are that I won’t, so it’s not much help unless I’m trying to avoid sites featuring naked people (and who wants to do that?).
Another less intrusive link popup is by MyBlogLog, which displays the popularity of a given link for outgoing clicks. Again, kind of irritating and not all that helpful.
Does the lowly hyperlink need any more information? I’m hesitant to definitively say no, but I’ve yet to find myself aching for more metadata before I click.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I feel those previews would be more useful did they not open over text areas.
Most of the time I mouse over the link while reading, to see where it goes before I venture there. The pop-up preview interrupts my reading flow and I find that irritating.
If there were a way to ensure that the pop-up appeared in a blank space, or better yet atop an advert, these things might be slightly more useful. Though as you observed, they don’t seem very useful anyway.
Can’t stand them. I’m currently doing a photo-per-day project for all of 2007 and posting both to a hosted wordpress.com blog and Flickr, but am considering dropping the wordpress.com site and just going with Flickr because of the things.
They’re irritating as hell. I click on a link because i want the information at the other end not because if it’s not well designed enough i won’t visit.
Some people may not even bother going to a blog if it’s littered with these multiple irritating pop up ad type things.
at least with a real pop up ad you get irritated only once. with Snap on your blog the irritation is endless.
Just wanted to point out that the doodlebuy.com site isn’t John Batelle’s as mentioned in the post. I had posted a comment about Doodlebuy.com using snap preview in John Batelle’s blog and that may have caused the confusion.
Secondly, about the effectiveness/irritabilty ratio of snap preview, I think we will need to wait and see how the users react to it. But it does have some coolness about it , and may be the reason so many websites are adopting it.
Sam: Sorry about that. I’m not sure how I concluded that Batelle and Doodlebuy were associated. Regardless, I’ve fixed that.
I’ve disabled Snap previews as I found them intrusive. The user should be allowed to able or disable the feature.
For links whose purpose is tell a visual story ie frame grabs of sites archived on The Internet Archive or photos in particular, the previews work. For anything else they dont’t.
Am I suppsoe to be able to read the contents of that tiny webpage that is highlighted?
Unfortunately, it’s appeal is for a web user that needs constant visual stimulation.
In the meantime I’m heading back to my barely Web 1.0 blog.
Gregg
You can opt out of Snap previews. It makes more sense to offer it as a browser plugin than force it on the user. If you’re a wordpress.com blogger–to take an example totally at random–you can disable these on your site by clicking Presentation, then Extras, and unchecking “Enable Snap Preview Anywhere on this blog”.
They drive me insane! I hope the trend stops now. Dead. They break the train of thought, and pop up for every single link. If users used them only when necessary (as some have suggested for visual comparison of sites) it might not be so bad, but it’s almost becoming as bad as animated gifs were 10 years ago. What’s worse is when people have links to their own pages (or permalinks of the page you are already reading!) with snap previews. Stop. Stop now.
I was going to submit your article to Reddit, and searched to make sure it wasn’t submitted already, and found this:
http://reddit.com/goto?id=zzh7
which links to this:
http://www.snap.com/about/spa_faq.php?disable_spa=1#2
which is Snap’s page to alter their cookie to turn of the Snap previews for every page you visit. I just tested it on Doodlebuy. Works.
Glad I’m not the only one who feels this way. I really despise both of them (even the seemingly innocuous MyBlogLog ones) — they’re not useful to me at all.
Sure the technology is cool, but this is taking it too far.
Darren et.al,
My name is Erik Wingren and I head up UX Research for Snap.com — the company behind the Snap Preview Anywhere™ service.
First things first: Thank you for sharing your experience. Your viewpoints help inform the continous development of this product.
Next, in addition to the opt-out link posted above I wanted to point out that this is also available directly from within the preview bubble. Simply click “Options†in the upper-right corner of the preview bubble and disable previews for the site in question or globally.
And finally, whether you believe it or not, our intentions are good: By offering the readers a glimpse of what the author links to we like to think that we help manage their expectations — giving them more information to base their decision whether to click on a link or not — and thereby improving their overall experience on the authors site. A happy user tends to come back. Done right everybody wins.
However, while graphic previews has a relatively high relevancy on a link by link basis, not everyone are “visually” oriented, which in turn leads me to my question…
– What type of information would help You make more informed decisions about what links to click on?
Cheers.
—
Erik Wingren
Snap UX Research
erik[@]snap[.]com
Erik: Thanks for coming by. Does ‘UX’ stand for user experience? And do you say ‘ucks’ or ‘yew-ex’? Just wondering.
I may not be your target demographic, so I’d take what I say with a grain of salt. That is, I’ve been using the Internet for a long time, and may be pretty set in my ways.
Also, I’m not sure what you mean when you write ‘graphic previews has a relatively high relevancy on a link by link basis’.
My experience with Snap is pretty straightforward. The site owner is trading the readability of the current page for a preview of the page behind a link. On top of that, there’s nothing that distinguishes a Snap-enabled link from a non-Snap enabled link. If I’ve got my terminology correct, there are no ‘affordances’.
So, when I mouse over a Snap-enabled link, I’m surprised and frustrated by the user interface, which is never a good thing.
Let’s think outside the proverbial box for a minute. What’s some of the other possible metadata one could serve up for a link?
* The aggregate popularity of that page, based on a combination of, say, Google PR, Technorati and Alexa (that’s the formula ReviewMe uses).
* Demographic information about the other visitors who normally visit that page, mined out of MyBlogLog or a similar service.
* An abstract rating of the destination page, based on Magnolia Roots or something similar.
* The size of the page.
* The ad-to-content ratio.
I’m just brainstorming, really. To answer your question, any of those things would provide more information about a link.
However, the point is that I can’t think of anything that I’d be willing to sacrifice readability for. The Web in 2007 isn’t all that readable to begin with, so that’s a precious commodity for me.
Ultimately, the best and easiest way to provide good information about a link is to construct the words that comprise it correctly.
In adding my dissent toward snap popups let me also direct an answer back to Erik. Personally, I don’t impute any malice toward snap and their intentions: they intend to do what we all are trying to do, build a successful company that provides value to investors, customers, and hopefully end users. The pop up looks slick, and the first time I saw it I thought, “cool”. But beyond my technical admiration, they are just annoying. They obscure content on the page that I’m trying to read, and I have to take care where my mouse cursor rests.
Far from motivating me to click through a link (it’s just too easy to click, glance, and hit back if something about the link appeals to me), I can imagine that it could discourage a user from clicking a link. If they’ve gotten a preview their curiosity is somewhat satisfied, and wrongfully so.