[Sigia-l] Info on splash pages and flash movie intros

[Russ Unger]

> On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 09:52, Bruce Morrison wrote: 
> > Personally I hate splash pages and flash movie intros, I 
> know they are
> > bad and why but is anyone aware of any studies or 
> statistics that relate
> > to how users deal with them. I'm especially after any ammo as to the
> > numbers of visitors that leave a site without getting past them.
> 
> The closest I have come to stats is New Survey Results: 80% 
> of Consumers
> Hate Flash Intros
> http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2524
> 
> I've read many of the articles that say they are bad but I'd 
> like to be
> able to point to an article that contains some "hard" evidence that
> these evil things effect visits to a site.  

Please don't take it wrong, but isn't anything that precludes a user
from quickly performing an action (and in a lot of cases slows them down
in their purchasing process--I hate it when Amazon has a letter from
Bezos when I need to get a book) or quickly obtaining information pretty
much hard evidence?

I think you might need to re-define what it is that you're talking about
as an "intro" movie; there are some with and without relevant substance.
If there's an intro that gives information, perhaps shows up only once a
year with a cookie or upon request or some other mechanism with results
(ie length of time spent on a page in stats)--that is, it's more signal
than noise, then I think it's successful.  So, with that, I think that
you can't fully throw all intros (although I'd like to and I strongly
dislike them and recommend against them at the cost of revenue for
increased client satisfaction) into the same category.

Perhaps differentiating and/or categorizing them and where they occur
will help you with your evidence.  If the intro is a part of a home page
integrated with HTML content instead of being the pop-up or if the site
is commerce vs marketing vs design firms...

I'm starting to ramble, but I think those considerations will help you
present a case without fully having tons of resources to support the
cause.

Russ