[Sigia-l] Video usability - chapter headers / timecodes?

[Jayson Elliot]

TED has an attractive player; the progress bar / playback head is nicely
sized re: Fitts and the separation of the Play/Pause button is excellent re:
Hicks.

They do provide chapter markers and subtitles when the video has such info
in it, so that's a great thing.

However, they also hide the presence of the chapter markers until the user
accidentally hovers over the area, meaning that the majority of the time,
the user will not realize the chapters are there at all.

A Google Video approach is better, in that the chapters are always visible -
although even that is sub-optimal, because the chapters are indicated by
thumbnails only, which have limited information value.

Jonathan - your Brunel and Raskin quotes are absolutely correct, and I
personally agree with both of them, but when dealing with a nervous and
conservative client, "innovation" will always be viewed with fear and
suspicion, whereas well-trodden paths will at least have a minor chance of
acceptance.


On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 4:29 PM, Jonathan Baker-Bates <
jonathan at bakerbates.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 2009-12-03 at 14:29 -0500, Jayson Elliot wrote:
> > I've designed a video player / page for a client's website which includes
> > chaptering, showing the timecodes for each chapter and a brief
> description
> > of what happens at that point in the video.
> > Nothing too revolutionary, Google Video's been doing it for ages, as have
> > many others.
> >
> > Being an ultraconservative client who doesn't have a lot of web
> experience,
> > they've asked for user research / usability "best practices" / other
> > examples in order to make their decision.
> >
> > Does anyone know of anything I could point to?
> >
>
> YouTube has the de facto standard UI for delivering video (not hugely
> wonderful in my opinion, but that's life).You could do worse than to
> look at the player that ted.com uses, which is quite nice, as is that of
> Vimeo. Note the fact that the former also provides transcripts, which is
> an accessibility best practice as codified in the WCAG. In fact I think
> the WCAG has various other things to say about multimedia, but none of
> it will be UI specific.
>
> Personally, I would just bowdlerize Brunel:
>
> "I am opposed to the laying down of rules or conditions to be observed
> in the construction of video players, lest the progress of improvement
> tomorrow might be embarrassed or shackled by recording or registering as
> law the prejudices or errors of today."
>
> paraphrased by Raskin:
>
> "You're not going to be able to do anything better by being the same as
> everyone else."
>
> Jonathan
>
>
>
>
>