The annoying “Mouse-over Floaters”

There's a fine line between "utility" and "annoyance" for any viewer of a web page.

Some of the new gimmicksefforts to capture user attention whether to draw the reader to another web site (like Snap) or deliver advertising (like Vibrant Media's Intellitxt) can be very annoying.

Astute visitors to this blog via the web site (1vc.typepad.com) will have observed that I turned off the Snap preview of hyperlinks because I started to find it distracting on other web sites I visited. The mere act of scrolling through the article or trying to click on interesting links became a perilous journey whenever the cursor passed over a link. Why? Because I didn't find the resulting floating window ("floater") interesting enough to warrant the intrusion!

The inspiration for this post came from a page that included in-line ads placed with Vibrant's ill-named Intellitxt technology. With Intellitxt, Vibrant sells words within a web page to a large advertiser like Intel or Microsoft. The words are double-underlined and a mouse-over on these links pops up an ad in a floater. These floaters have to be closed manually or you suffer a five second dose of the ad even when you move the mouse away. Annoying? Very! Intellitxt is a great example because it intrudes in the reading experience and provides no utility to the reader.

Please, if you are going to "add" to the reading experience either require explicit action (click on an icon as Snap is trying to reduce the annoyance factor) or provide high utility to the reader. High utility will translate to more viral adoption that sticks.

"Ecto gamut!"^*

 

^* "Never without my permsission!" – Milla Jovovich as "Leeloo" in "The Fifth Element"

 

Comments

[Erik Wingren]

Stu,

My name is Erik Wingren and I head up UX Research for Snap — the company behind the Snap Preview Anywhere™ service.

First, just to clarify: Snap Preview Anywhere does NOT process or modify content like intellitxt does. Snap Preview functionality is enabled only on bona fide hyperlinks, as defined by the site owner / author. The business objectives of Snap Preview Anywhere is to showcase the benefits of visualization and drive awareness & trial of our [visual] search engine Snap.com

Second: I believe your feedback re: deliberate user action as a prerequisite for perceived utility is very valid. In fact, we recently posted a write-up of the Snap Preview Anywhere Use Case on our blog, where we reiterate Snap’s intentions and design objectives, acknowledge and respond to key points in the recent criticism and outline recent usability enhancements, aimed at solving the issues you raise and then some: http://blog.snap.com/2007/02/09/spa-use-case/

Cheers.
--
Erik Wingren
Snap UX Research

[Stu Phillips]

Mike,

Thanks for pointing me to the furor that Intellitxt has generated - I first saw the IntelliTxt links in an article I read at PCMag about Google's comments on the Internet and TV this weekend.

Sorry if my point didn't come across - the purpose of the post was to highlight that viewers have to gain utility from something being used to capture their attention. Given the number of companies using the Internet for distribution, this is a hot button for me.

Anyway, I'll limp back to my spreadsheet and finish my morning coffee! :-)

Stu

[Mike Hunt]

Dude, you are so lame. You are a typical VC blogger that reads a bunch of blogs and then tries to make it sound like you own blog is insightful. There is a zilliion posts about his over the past 2 months and you just now blog on it? And you don't give any trackbacks? Stick to excel.