Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Design Trends I Hate - Slide Shows

Let me put on my curmudgeon's cap and jersey for a moment, and discuss a web design and content trend I really hate. That's slide shows. They're ubiquitous it seems, and often they have information that sounds interesting. "10 Facts About Happiness," "15 Underrated Horror Films," "Best Celebrity Cellulite Solutions."

It's getting to that information that's the challenge. You can get Number 15, but moving to Number 14 is another matter, especially with the variety of devices we have to access the web.

If you're viewing the web in, oh, a browser, slide shows become time consuming.

The #$%)&*_&^%$#$%^%ing *&+#@!%^ *&^%$ button is never located conveniently to the copy. It's usually somewhere up near the address bar, and the text is somewhere down below an image.

For me it invariably means scrolling down to read the content then back up to find the button to advance. Then it's scroll down again to read.

When I was talking about this on Twitter, Robin Ashe added a good observation. There's often an ad link in the mix that looks like the button you ought to click.

Gets the website a click through and you even more delay in reading and moving on.

Add to that the fact that they're not really slide shows a lot of the time, just separate web pages THAT HAVE TO LOAD.

I know why this is all like it is. I know it's a clever scheme, nay, a conspiracy for click throughs, but it's annoying as hell.

I think I'm going to declare a moratorium on browsing web slideshows. I won't need facts on happiness then. I'll just be happy not clicking and scrolling so often.

3 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

I hardly ever watch any kind of videos on line. they are very time consuming and it takes so much longer typically for me to get the info I want than if I just scanned the written material.

Sidney said...

I tend to agree. I would rather have text that I can scan than a video to have to sit through to glean the information I want. I hate it when there's a news link and the only option is to watch a video to get the story.

Chauncey said...

Cool!

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