Pet Peeve: Pushy Profile Pages
Jul 28 '00
Mostly I have a nice time here. Mostly.
But every so often things pop up that just bug me. They aren't that big of a deal and they don't ruin my day. They just sort of get on my nerves. Oh, I'm not talking about the perennial issues, like revenge rating, unfair status, Income Share hooey- no, those, like the poor, will always be with us. I'm talking about something small. Something that may not bother anyone else.
Profile Pages that Do Things.
When I go to someone's profile page, I an generally looking to find out what they have written lately or learn a little about who they are to get some help with rating a review. I am not there to have a multimedia experience. When I am surfing the Web, there are two things that will make me leave a site and never return, and I'm afraid that the same holds true for member pages.
I don't like windows that pop up without being requested. I have to wait for them to finish loading before I can close them. Even if I were interested in the service being pushed by the window (usually some sort of special cursor) I would reject the offer because of the way it's presented to me.
But that's a minor annoyance compared with pages that make my computer play music. To me, this is one of the nastiest tricks a Web designer can play. It really, really slows down the loading of the page and sometimes makes it impossible to back out once the music starts loading. I'm stuck, unable to get away until that midi file starts playing. Once I can get away, I usually leave without looking at the list of reviews. I just want to get as far away as I can as quickly as possible.
I can understand the desire to make your page special and to do something that will make it stand out. If you think people want music with your page, give them that option. It's just as easy to make a button that allows people to play music if they want it as it is to force autoplay on the unsuspecting. The same is true with pop up windows. Some people may want to learn about special cursors- just give us a choice, okay?
The thing is, I worry that people don't know that these things are annoying. It feels really rude to write to someone and say, "I'm not visiting your page anymore because it makes my computer play music." They probably worked really hard to get it to do that. They probably really like it that way.
And there's a part of me that's actually glad to see people learning HTML and putting it to work. It reminds me of teaching Web design to seventh graders- they end up with the ugliest, tackiest, slowest loading pages you ever saw. They like the flaming skull animated gifs, the rainbow colored backgrounds that make their text illegible, and they love making the pages play music. They also learn a lot in the process. Good taste in design can come later.
And I don't mean that Epinions members should change things just to please me. The things I see as profile blunders probably really impress some people. I do think it's important to know that speed of page loading is incredibly important to people who visit your pages- studies have repeatedly shown that waiting is what people hate most about Web surfing.
Taking out some of the fancy stuff might get some extra hits for your reviews.
It's worth thinking about.
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Epinions.com ID:
fdknight
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Member: F. Douglas Knight
Location: Astoria, OR
Reviews written: 115
Trusted by: 101 members
About Me:
When he awakes the summer night is filled with screams.
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