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

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

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