A look into video sites
Video on the web is everywhere. But if you are listing a bunch of videos on your website, just using text doesn’t do it. This is personal research that I’ve turned into a blog post.
If you are building a website with video you might find this useful.
What are we working with?
Videos often contain:
- Title
- Description
- Audio
- Moving Images (video)
- Thumbnail
How do we select what videos we watch?
Personally I look at the following things. In ranking order:
- Look at the thumbnail, see if its interesting - Able to judge video quality and type of video from the thumbnail.
- Read title > Usually sold by the title
- Read description If the title didn’t include enough information or still unsure, then read short description if available.
Let’s look at some examples
TED Talks
Ted is an interesting example:
- Thumbnails with overlaying Title with opacity
- Varying sizes of thumbnails according to recentness or ranking in a category e.g “funny”, “inspiring”.
- Javascript overlay with more information
Next Example: YouTube
It’s probably the worst experience of displaying lists of video.
- Spotlight video in separate section highlighting a sigular video
- Thumbnails (bordered)(animated scrubbing)
- Video length/time overlaid over thumbnail (TED Talks don’t have to do this because all of their video has a similar length time)
- Amount of views
- User who posted video
