che Usability?

Video killed the radio star; is it also killing your web site’s usability?

Maybe that question is a bit dramatic, but research shows that users view well-crafted short videos that take advantage of the medium’s dynamic nature — and by short I mean between 30 and 60 seconds.

On the other hand, if you are posting long “talking head” videos — your users are probably bailing after about 24 seconds.

So, if you’re posting videos of your CEO prattling on for 5 minutes, your users are not getting the message.

These “talking head” videos are more prevalent on corporate portals where the CEO or VPs want to share their messages through the power of video. Most of these videos come wrapped up in sensitive organizational politics, meaning it’s often kind of hard to tell your CEO that you are not going post his or her video.

To mitigate these situations, create guidelines for posting videos. For example, here’s a list of suggested specifications:

Video size: 320 x 240 pixels
Frames per second: 15
Video run time: 1 minute maximum

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 9:27 am and is filed under Usability, Usability design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.