Snap Preview Anywhere, considered by many as one of the most annoying “gimmicks” on the web, continues to be enabled by default on WordPress.com blogs. Many new bloggers are still “testing” this gimmick which allows a thumbnail preview or feed view of the linked content when the mouse hovers over the link.
When it first came out, a lot of top bloggers took it for a test drive, then soon realized how much it interfered with the reading and interaction of their blogs, annoying readers. Wise bloggers know that anything that gets between a reader and the blog content loses readers.
After a lot of research myself, the only justification I’ve found for using Snap Preview is for sites which provide links to blog reviews, Theme reviews, or graphics. The tiny thumbnail view of the visual aspect of the site or image matches the theme of the post content.
The main three reasons that so many people don’t like it are:
- It pops up a thumbnail without warning as their mouse moves over the link, even accidentally, startling the reader and covering up content they are trying to read.
- It doesn’t meet with accessibility standards and makes reading content hard for those with visual impairment.
- The only way for the reader to turn it off is through an “opt-out” program, forcing the reader to visit the Snap Preview site to turn it off. The site turns it off for that IP address. Switch IP addresses by moving to another computer, Internet service, or otherwise, and it’s back.
It doesn’t add value to your blog. It’s hard to even see what’s in the small thumbnail image. It takes time and bandwidth to load the popup. You should be able to make it go away by clicking anywhere on the page away from the popup, which sometimes takes a long time to go away, and may cause you to inadvertently click a link, causing you to leave the page and forcing you to back up to the original page, or just leave it in frustration.
On the Snap Preview Anywhere popup, there is an option to disable it. I’ve clicked this numerous times and it has never worked. It also interferes with one of my most powerful blog post writing tools, the Copy Link Text (CoLT) Firefox Extension which allows me to quickly copy and paste full code-ready links into my blog posts. Since implementation of Snap Preview on the WordPress.com blogs, including the main site pages, it takes me an addition ten to twenty minutes to generate my weekly WordPress Wednesday News reports as I do battle for the links with the popup windows.
If you want the gimmick, leave it turned on.
If you want it turned off:
In WordPress.com blogs: Go to Presentation > Extras and uncheck the Snap Preview feature box to disable it on your blog. Click Update to save the changes.- Full Version WordPress Blogs: In order to work on a full version WordPress blog, the Snap Preview WordPress Plugin must be installed and activated. To disable it, deactivate the Plugin and remove it from your blog’s server.
- Opt-Out and Disable Snap Preview Globally: In theory, you can disable Snap Preview on a site-by-site basis through the popup windows, but it has never worked for me. Or you can visit their site and disable Snap Preview there, but it only disables it per IP address. It will stop you seeing it on any web page with the feature enabled.
- Ask Your Favorite Blogger: If you find it on a favorite blog, ask the blogger to stop using it. They may like the gimmick effect and not realize how much it is annoying you and the other readers. They won’t change anything until you let them know.
Need a second opinion? ShandyKing disabled Snap Preview based upon feedback from his readers, even after he posted an article that got him in the top rankings listing the top 100 blogs using Snap Preview.
I’ve installed Snap a week ago and have asked my readers for their honest feedback. After a week of testing it out I have decided to remove it from my site. In fact I have come to the conclusion this tool hurts website owners more then helps them.
Before I go into why I feel the way I do about it I would like to congratulate the folks over at Snap on creating a viral product and for additionally getting WordPress to agree on making their plug-in available on 600,000 Blogs.
…It sucks on my part to find out that I was placed on the top 100 then have to tell the world why I don’t want to use it. Since I did request public feedback, I should be honest and report my opinions on it.
There are alternatives to Snap Preview. Cooliris allows the user to click a link to open the preview popup window, rather than have it forced upon you. If any similar product is to have success, it must allow the user to completely control their experience. Allow them to choose whether or not they want to see the popup previews, don’t force them upon them, or make them do a dance to remove it from their view.
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.
30 Comments
And Automattic, could you PLEASE turn off Snap Preview by default on new blogs? Whenever I start a new WordPress.com blog, I always forget about turning that feature off, and then have people come to me complaining about it.
Thank you so much for this post Lorelle, it’s the first time I’ve seen that I’m not the only one who hates this so-called feature.
Thank you. I absolutely hate the snap preview feature. It’s especially annoying for those of us still using a dial-up.
Snap has to be one of the most annoying things in the history of the web. I understand how it might have seemed like a good idea, but it wasn’t. I tend to visit blogs that use it a lot less often than I otherwise might.
I haven’t had a complaint about Snap in the eight months I’ve been blogging, but since I respect your opinion I’m going to disable it. I didn’t realise it was such a big annoyance until now.
I used Snap on my blogs early on. I thought it was a cool thing to be able to see where something linked. Of course, most of my links on my site were to other posts on my site, so I was simply seeing a lot more of my blog. So vain, I am…
It wasn’t until I saw it on other blogs where it started to really bother me — I’d look at the pop-up and then totally get taken out of the article on the blog. It was like having Twitter interrupt your blog reading with yet another “I’m going out now” line.
So I took it out. Didn’t do it because my readers responded that way, but did it on the basis that a pop-up like that is poor writing. It becomes part of the message and if it doesn’t support your message, then it shouldn’t be there.
Thanks for writing this. I didn’t realize it was standard on WordPress.com blogs…
I have had it on several blogs for 6 months and NEVER ONCE got a complaint. I not sure why you call it a “gimmick” if so many bloggers find it helpful. If it is not for you, that is fine, but why the name calling and why run a brownshirt campaign to browbeat the rest of us into accepting your point of view and lobbying removal from sites? (BTW, I am not sure but I believe you opt out once for all sites.)
As a user, I prefer it on blogs as I can see the content of a link much faster than clicking and waiting for the page to load.
My name is Erik Wingren and I head up UX Research for Snap.com — the company behind the Snap Shots web service (formerly known as Snap Preview Anywhere).
First I want to thank Lorelle for this and previous mentions of our product — these posts play a significant role in triggering a conversation across the blogosphere, providing us with invaluable inspiration and indirectly helping us define updates, which in turn help sustain a remarkable growth and popularity of Snap Shots, as evidenced by the glowing reviews and +100K downloads of the Snap Shots Add-On in just over a month. Lorelle, we couldn’t have done it without you!
Second, I would like to briefly discuss the concept of usefulness.
As a publisher you have a responsibility to your audience. If I was to attempt boiling down the science of audience research I would say this comes down to a combination of knowing who they are, what they want and what they need.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your audience *exclusively* made up of experienced Internet users that read your blog using browsers that support tabbed browsing (essentially IE7, Firefox, Opera or Safari)?
- Are you *not* interested in attracting and retaining readers that doesn’t fit this user profile?
- Do you *consistently* follow “proper” markup protocol, defining the target and title of the link within the opening and closing of the anchor tag? Are your links blue with solid underline?
The point is that usefulness is a subjective measure, highly impacted by the context in which a functionality is used as well as the behavior and experience of the individual user.
If you, like Lorelle, are writing a technical blog for a technical audience (or “wise bloggers”, like Lorelle calls them), your readers a more likely to be trained in picking up on the subtle cues already provided by the browser framework — the status bar and link title attribute. And the “cost” of occasional erroneous clicks are more likely to be mitigated through the use of advanced browser functionality such as tabbed browsing… But whatever you do, please don’t make the mistake of equating designing for a technically savvy audience with “accessibile design”. If anything, the opposite is closer to reality.
On the other hand, if the user profile or markup principles described above are too narrow for your taste or ambition, I believe that by implementing Snap Shots you would in fact offer ALL your readers MORE information to base their decision on which links to click or not to click, REDUCING the number of unwanted outbound clicks mid-read and, in effect, IMPROVE their ability to focus on YOUR content, or the content you link to that they TRULY wanted to visit.
And finally, for the technically savvy and inspired, since customization of Snap Shots isn’t available to WordPress.com bloggers I wanted to share the following little hack: the link icons you see on Techcrunch and elsewhere, can in fact be called upon from a wordpress.com blog by adding the class “snap_trigger_*” to your links, spans or divs (replace * with “both” to make the Shot activate on both the link text and icon, or replace * with “icon” to make it activate on the icon only). More on link icons in the Snap Shots FAQ.
Cheers.
–
Erik Wingren
Snap UX Research
Stephen Thomas: Name calling? As I said in the article, if it works for you, then don’t turn it off. If it isn’t, whether or not your readers have the courage to tell you, turn it off.
Mr. Wingren: I’m glad you are getting a lot of attention from my negative review of your services. Hopefully, it will help you change it so it is something the reader can better control rather than having it forced upon them. Hopefully work is being done to make this meet web standards for accessibility. Is this turned off the moment the program detects a screen reader or disabled-assist browser?
As for judging my readership, you missed by a long shot. Take care when you assume. My readers are “average” folks - intelligent and wise, of course - which cover a wide spectrum of folks from around the world, many of them reading this blog through a translation service on old computers with a dial up or non-high speed access service.
The information provided by Snap Preview/Snap Shot doesn’t add to the “wealth” of information that a well-written link does. It does, however, enforce the notion that looks speak louder than actions.
I like to judge myself as one who puts the title attribute in every link I used and I am using tab browsing with firefox.
I used to have Snap Preview as a plugin on my blog, but when I actually took upon myself to surf my site as a reader, I found it how annoying it was. When I hover over a link, this little snapshot would appear and it would take sometime to load. And when it did, all I got was an outdated version of the site’s actual appearance.
How do I know that? I changed my site’s layout a few days ago, but it remained the same look. On top of that, it makes my page loading a tad little slower to complete.
Thank you so much. I have hated those things from about 5 minutes after I started on WordPress (they were cute for about 5 minutes).
SPA is a pain in the butt, it really is. As soon as I discover a blog is using SPA, I leave it instantly and put it on my blacklist.
SPA also adds significantly to the page load time on dial-up. It’s particularly annoying when the mouse cursor hovers over a link and triggers SPA, which takes a lot of time to load up and doesn’t go away even if I click elsewhere.
Lorelle: I don’t quite see how the Snap Preview functionality would affect a screen reader or disabled assist browser in any way at all. The Snap functionality is purely javascript, generally included at the bottom of the page. It modifies the links after the fact by adding mouseovers and mouseouts and such, so unless the screen reader software is confused by mouseovers, it’s not going to affect anything. I would expect disabled assist software to not execute javascript at all when doing reading and such.
I heard from a lot of my “disabled” friends before and after I first reported on this, and they told me that on old screen readers, it created a conflict and error. It didn’t impact newer ones because the Javascript is set to be ignored on many of those.
However, many who use accessibility features such as enlarged type, zoom, projectors, magnifiers, and such to see only a tiny bit of the screen at a time to read it word by word, or in some cases, letter by letter, or read with their enlarged mouse pointer to track each line they read (like reading with your finger), were hampered as this “thing” popped up without warning, covering their entire screen.
They couldn’t see what it was, nor how to turn it off, since it comes with no instructions. There is nothing anywhere that says “if you want to see popups over links, click this. If they pop up, click off the popup to make it go away.”
I had one friend with a form of myopia call me in tears, thinking she’d done something wrong and broke her customized computer. After over an hour, she couldn’t get it to go away because all she could see was a portion of the popup and nothing of her browser screen.
Without instructions, 800 numbers for help, or any other obvious clues, how do people know how to handle this?
I have no problem with the other models of this “preview” technique that are out there that allow you to click to view the preview rather than having it forced upon you. If the reader can control the experience, that’s the way to go.
Don’t forget, I belong to the majority of humans who believe that there should be an OPT-IN list for receipt of junk mail, ads and spam in email, comment spam, telemarketers, and all other methods of unwanted advertising. Let us decide if we want your junk. Don’t force it upon us. And don’t make us sign up for a list you don’t check. If you send it to me and I’m not on the OPT-IN list, some serious penalties should be enforced.
I’m a much more willing investor and shopper when I make the choice.
I considered using it on my blog but as I reader of other blogs that use it, I found it highly annoying; it disrupts the flow of reading, so I stayed away from it.
Thank you… I was just asking someone how to get rid of these annoying pop-ups and sure enough I was led to you.
Those snapshots are the most invasive thing yet, and I can’t get rid of them because it depends on a cookie. I don’t want the cookie; I want the ability to block it permanently. Cookies from sites that violate my privacy do not have a place to live in my computer. Multiple attempts to block the content in Opera have failed.
You can also block Snap’s site with an entry in your Hosts file. The code never gets loaded, so you never see any popups, regardless of cookies/javascript.
Here’s the entry:
127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com
Thanks for the help. I had turned it off so I didn’t see those pesky snap previews on my computer, but I’m sure they were annoying everyone who looked at my blog who hadn’t turned it off.
The main problem I had was my Facebook imports from my wordpress.com blog had random code in them from the snap preview that was automatically in my wordpress posts that I couldn’t edit off of the Facebook note. Thanks for the solution!
Thanks for this. Helped me out. If only WordPress had a menu system built for humans rather than computer programmers…
Thanks so much for this post, it helped me get rid of the Snap Shots!
Thank you…thank you. I was slowly losing my mind with them damn things.
ahh .. thank for your help. this is what i looking for
no snap anymore
I found this post on google and couldn’t agree more with the content of it. Most importantly, I found a way to turn of the snap-gimmick (something which is not mentioned on the wordpress help site)
Thanks a lot! I’m thinking about switching from Blogger to WordPress, and the wretched Snap Preview was one of the big things keeping me from doing it.
@ mrquizzical:
Glad to help. Also, know that some Blogger blogs are using Snap Preview, though many have learned their lesson due to the negative response of their readers. But some never learn.
Thank you so much… We have a blog relating to admissions to our college and that idiotic Snap thing interfered like nuts with us typing or people having a look at the blog.
Woohoo!
Interesting idea. Really poor execution.
Thanks for the tip Lorelle — I turned it off after stumbling onto the setting on my first blog and had a hard time remembering where to find it on my second.
THANK YOU. Those little windows have been driving me bonkers, and I didn’t know I could turn them off on my blog!
Much appreciated. Although the menu seems to have changed somewhat from what is documented here I found it under Design>Extras (’Design’ I presume is a new equivalent of ‘Presentation’?)
@ tygerkrash:
Yes, those using the new versions of WordPress will see a different menu option. That may be changing again soon, so I’ll update this accordingly. Thanks.
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