The Human Touch?

[AJK]

Has anyone here experienced or tried to implement a video/flash
overlay on their website, which basically either introduces the
website or tries to sell something?

You liked it it? Hated it? Read some research on it somewhere?

[Lynnsey]

I don't think I've seen this - can you share some examples?

[AJK]

Local example of company providing services: http://www.webpersonalitiessa.co.za/
See it in action here: http://www.webtron.com.au/pages/Website-Interactive-Video.html

[Phil]

I think I saw this done once last year on a site that sold diving
gear.

My wife and I laughed so hard, we almost collapsed.

We were laughing at it, not with it.

As Steve Krug says "Happy talk must die". On the diving site where I
saw it, the personality was providing extended video happy talk. It
was the most spectacular waste of time and bytes and did not help me
achieve my goals in any way (cf goals and tasks thread that's been
going on).

But.

If I were about to use a very complex or novel piece of web-based
software, and if I was an inexperienced user, and if they really
worked hard to persuade me it was worth it, I might take this kind of
video personality seriously for a few minutes of guided tour. Google
Sketchup has a "compulsory" training stage after you first install,
with a cartoon character in it, and it works. Because you REALLY need
the training or you'll never make it.

Most of the time, this will just be high-fidelity, video "clippy".
And we all know how much people enjoyed that. "It seems that you're
interested in buying some diving gear. Would you like me to a) point
out the obvious b) use up your valuable lunch break and alert your
boss to your web surfing behaviour or c) push you over to 2GB broaband
cap?"

--Phil--

[Nick]

I saw a nice example for a communications agency (http://
www.carat.co.uk/) where an embedded video just played. Unfortunately
the video is no longer there.

The video was a wmv, or .mov, embedded with a plain old <object> so
accessibility on the technical side was poor, and there was the
horrible default video player around it.

However I really like the video. It was a video of their staff giving
one word explanations of what the company did. The video would cycle
through the staff, so I could hear what the company did quite clearly
and concisely and see a nice bunch of faces that work there. The video
was done quite well, in an apple promo style.

The other reason I liked it (at the instance) was the browser window
was in the background, and I was hearing what the people were talking
about, and that made me go looking for the tab it was hiding in.
Before I'd gone back to the site I knew a little about the company
from what I heard.

So technically, it was done badly (probably why they removed it) but
at the moment it worked for me and clearly communicated what the did
and didn't make me want to close the browser window / mute my sound. I
also found different people repeating the same word, or a different
word with the same meaning really hammered the message home.

[Patrick Homan]

Kill them all!

....along with infomercials!

Cheers.

Patrick Homan
Quirk eMarketing
User Experience Designer
www.quirk.biz

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07:51:00

[Nick]

I just saw Glass Houses new (html) site uses a lot of video -
http://www.glasshouse.co.za/html/html.php

Unfortunately the Javascript is quite intense, it crashed my safari
when I had a few other tabs open.