By Jakob Nielsen. Multimedia is gaining popularity on the Web with several technologies to support use of animation, video, and audio to supplement the traditional media of text and images.
These new media provide more design options but also require design discipline. Unconstrained use of multimedia results in user interfaces that confuse users and make it harder for them to understand the information. Not every webpage needs to bombard the user with the equivalent of Times Square in impressions and movement. Moving images have an overpowering effect on the human peripheral vision. This is a survival instinct from the time when it was of supreme importance to be aware of any saber-toothed tigers before they could sneak up on you. These days, tiger-avoidance is less of an issue, but anything that moves in your peripheral vision still dominates your awareness: it is very hard to, say, concentrate on reading text in the middle of the a page if there is a spinning logo up in the corner.
Never include a permanently moving animation on a web page since it will make it very hard for your users to concentrate on reading the text.
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For newer guidelines, see article on animation for attention and comprehension. Due to bandwidth constraints, use of video should currently be minimized on the web. Eventually, video will be used more widely, but for the next few years most videos will be short and will use very small viewing areas. Under these constraints, video has to serve as a supplement to text and images more often than it will provide the main content of a website.
A major problem with most videos on the web right now is that their production values are much too low. User studies of CD-ROM productions have found that users expect broadcast-quality production values and that users get very impatient with low-quality video.
Response Time
A special consideration for video and spoken audio is that any narration may lead to difficulty for international users as well as for users with a hearing disability. People may be able to understand written text in a foreign language because they have time to read it at their own speed and because they can look up any unknown words in a dictionary. Spoken words are sometimes harder to understand, especially if the speaker is sloppy, has a dialect, speaks over a distracting soundtrack, or simply speaks very fast. The classic solution to these problems is to use subtitles but as shown in the following figure, subtitles require special attention on the web.
The figure shows a subtitled frame from Sun's Starfire video. The small subtitles left image look good on the original video tape JPEG, K but are virtually unreadable on the smaller image size currently used for computerized videos. Using bigger subtitles that have been anti-aliased for computer viewing middle image improves readability significantly, but the best results are achieved by the letterbox format right image. In this example, the subtitles in the letterbox are constructed by enlarging the video area for the movie file with a pixels high black area.
Doing so does not increase the file size proportionally since the black area compresses very nicely. Even so, it would be better to transmit the subtitles as ASCII or Unicode and have them rendered in the letterbox on the client machine: a perfect job for an applet. It would even be possible to have the user select the language for the subtitles through a preference setting or a pop-up menu JPEG, K. For newer findings, see article on eyetracking studies of video clips on websites.
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The main benefit of audio is that it provides a channel that is separate from that of the display. Speech can be used to offer commentary or help without obscuring information on the screen. Audio can also be used to provide a sense of place or mood as done to perfection in the game Myst. Mood-setting audio should employ very quiet background sounds in order not to compete with the main information for the user's attention. Music is probably the most obvious use of sound.
Whenever you need to inform the user about a certain work of music, it makes much more sense to simply play it than to show the notes or to try to describe it in words. And you may sell yourself short by making incorrect assumptions about how the different elements of your content or ad work together to affect response.
When you first started social media marketing, you had to base your strategy on some assumptions. For example, you might have read that tweets with photos get 35 percent more retweets.
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But does this hold true for your brand, and your audience? Then, if the tweet with the video performs best, you can test variations in the video itself—short versus long, sound versus silent, animated versus live action, and so on. This same logic applies across all elements of your social strategy. Over time, you will gain insights about what works best for you on each social network, helping to refine your social media strategy.
But you should continue to test small variations, even when you think you have a winning formula. The more you test, the more granular your understanding will be, which will allow you to stay on top of changes in audience preferences over time. The type and style of language you use in your social media post is worthy of extensive testing.
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For example, you could test:. The headline and description in a linked article preview are highly visible and important to test.
You can apply all the same tests mentioned for post content to your article headline. Keep in mind that you can edit the headline in the link preview, so it does not have to be the same as the headline on your website.
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The posts below link to the same content but use a slight variation in the link preview headline. One incorporates a digit, while the other does not. Hootsuite testing has shown, for example, that our Twitter audience responds very well to GIFs—so, not surprisingly, we incorporate them often in our tweets. But since audience preferences can change over time, we continue to test GIFs versus other image types—as in the tweets below.
Hashtags can extend your reach , but do they annoy your audience or drive down engagement? You should also test:. If you use a branded hashtag, be sure to test it against other industry hashtags, too. Flytographer used two different tweets—one packed with hashtags and one with no hashtags at all—to link to the same content.