Enriching Content While Respecting the User Experience

I wrote a post on Friday and was critical of Snap’s new Snap Preview Anywhere service. We had some interesting comments on the post including a thoughtful one by Erik Wingren, who heads up UX research for Snap.com. He wrote:

I wanted to let you know that we are working on an update to the code that will allow end-users greater control of the Snap Preview behavior.

Therein lies the crux of the issue for me. How do we continue to add rich content to the web, but do it in a way that allows end-users control over their experience?

I feel the need to eat a little crow on the initial post, because while I personally don’t love the Snap Preview feature, that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable to people. I actually felt a little bit like an old fogey complaining that new things are starting to happen on websites that I am not used to seeing.

I started thinking about where the web is headed…

• Close your eyes and imagine what the web experience will be in 10 years. Surely it won’t look like it does today. Maybe it will look like this demo of a Minority Report like interface. As we move from here to there, the web is going to continue to evolve and improved interactivity, richer content, and multimedia will be a part of it.

• AJAX, javascript and platforms like Flash and Adobe’s coming Apollo project will be the technological backbone this growth.

• Although some (myself included at times), like the experience the way it is right now, there are many people, (often younger than us) that crave a richer experience. The overwhelming success of MySpace proves that. Although many think its interface is poorly designed, that is the precisely the point. Its users like the rich experience and are able to parse the huge amount of multimedia presented on each page, while for the rest of us it is too overwhelming.

But getting back to the original point, the important thing to keep in mind is as we add features and functionality, widgets and plugins, we need to make sure that we offer the end-user a way to easily control his or her own experience.This clearly is what separates Snap Previews from Popups 1.0. With popups, no matter how hard you tried you couldn’t get rid of them (until the toolbar blockers came along). In Snap’s case, I encourage the one-click disable functionality built right into the interface, and I applaud Snap for listening and reaching out to bloggers. Clearly, the company takes the end-user experience very seriously.

It’s a delicate balance to deliver rich content while respecting the user experience, but its a goal we should all strive for.