Design vs Art Blog

Using video in a website is a whole issue, there are several usability problems we have to take care of at the moment of designing a website. I would like to tell you about a website I launched recently: it’s the Biccu Table website, dedicated to the presentation of a table design.

The Biccu Table website needed to be very graphical inorder to easily explain how the concept works and what is the table for (it’s a table for children). So we went for a video, making it the center of the website. Of course this brought some problems to the design…

Technical Issues

We got a few messages from users (actually 2) saying that they were not able to see the video. One thought that an Apple computer was needed and the other one said that the computer crashed several times during playing time. In our case this was a minimum amount of complaints in comparison to the big amount of positive feedback. But this is a warning, if you are targeting poorly technically-skilled users, keep in mind that playing video represent a challenge for some of them.

The Text

Every video, specially the ones with sound, should have an explanatory text giving information to the people that are not able to see the video (for example, visually impaired ones or for technical reasons). In our case, we noticed that the people were concentrated on the video only. Was that the desired effect? Great! For us, this was fine as the images were clear enough.

Too Long is Boring

Initially the videos we placed on the website were longer. We noticed that users were excited at the beginning but bored at the end. So, keep videos short.

Embedded Third Party Videos

Video players like the YouTube one are very popular and using them might improve usability, most users know how to use them. For us it was not an option, we wanted to have videos without ads, without external links and without any external branding.

Popularity: 24% [?]

If possible, a text equivalent should be provided for all visual information in a website, like video, music and interactive graphics. There are several reasons why a description text should be included in a website design.

- Old browsers might not be able to display some multimedia files

- Some browsers might not have the necessary plugins and the user might not be able to update it (or might not want to)

- Impaired people could have problems interacting with multimedia

- Visually impaired people could need a text version of the multimedia file to be read by web readers

- Not every body has a high speed internet connection to download multimedia files

Why should you care?  Improving usability helps everybody surfing your website, not only the impaired ones. Imagine that you trying to teach something through multimedia content, like a video; giving text explanation of what is going on in that video could improve the understanding of the idea you are trying to teach.

An image or video says a lot, but you could add much more value to that if you provide equivalent text for that media. At the end, if the user is able to see that media anyways, the text will increase the understanding of the message you are trying to deliver.

Popularity: 14% [?]