Slide show usability

What works, what doesn't?

[Wilma]

I have just started building slide shows, and realize I have seen virtually nothing about them usability-wise.

What makes a good slide show? What makes them stink? What makes for good/poor navigation & page structure?

Is it more useful to have spiders index only the intro page or first slide (so search engines display that) or the whole sequence (so searchers find the most relevant slide)?

What about indexing slides, or not, in a site's Search feature?

What other usability issues have I not even thought of?

Also, can anyone suggest good slide show creation tools? I use WebPics on Mac OS 9 for indexing photographs. Very, very easy to use, but when it comes to web pages I have to hammer the HTML pretty hard to get what I want. I'd really like a template-based tool, but the one I tried recently didn't build slide-to-slide links, so was pretty useless.

[Filipe]

A slide show template, if you know anything about server side scripting languages and databases, is pretty easy to set up and customize from scratch.

Run a search for "php slideshow", "asp slideshow" etc (for whatever your web server supports) on Google and you'll get a few good solutions.

[cfx211]

We have found that our users love slideshows to death, and will go through just about every image in them, provided that you keep each show around 20 images.

Great looking pictures on a interesting subject is what makes them successful. We just launched a slideshow on stationary and it does well, so as far as I know they work for anything provided the show is on topic to the user.

We launch our slideshows in a decent sized popup that people can then scroll through at their leisure. This way if they are not into the pictures, they can just close the popup and find something else.

[Wilma]

Any comments on the usability of thumbnails for navigation?

A friend claims thumbnails reduce his mental overhead; if he's comparing two pictures, the previous picture's thumbnail helps him remember what he saw. Plus of course it's a way to preload the next page's picture, if the thumbnail is actually a resized version of same.

Any comments on using either <LINK> tags, anchor REL attributes, or JavaScript to preload the next image or page? How much does preloading really help? My site gets overseas vistors on old computers with slow connections. I'm on DSL and can't tell the difference.

If you know any especially good or bad slide shows, or ones with particularly ingenous or problematic features, please sticky me the URL -- I'd like to look.

[tbear]

Hi Wilma,
And welcome to the visible side of WebmasterWorld (well you could have been lurking :+)).
I've used slide shows a couple of times, for artists, deciding to put thumbnails up and use a mouse-over to bring up their choice full-size in a central (or main) window. Of course you could pop up another window, but I avoided that (just my preference in these cases).
I looked at javascript, and other ways (on one site I did use flash to give a blend through effect with various paintings with the same basic form).
Personally I like to steer away from what I don't know (like java, etc.).
I found good free roll-over scripts by searching around a bit (as you do, LOL).
Hope this helps, have fun!
tbear

[tbear]

Didn't notice the last bit to your post (silly me).
>...if the thumbnail is actually a resized version of same.
I make smaller thumb versions of all the images, with a note that the images may take time to load (always makes waiting a bit more bearable (excuse the pun)), you can also state the file size in the link title tag (or just put 'big', 'bigger' and 'bigger still!')
Is that what you meant?

[Wilma]

Actually I meant using the full-sized graphic for the thumb. For instance, we're on page 2 with graphic 02.jpg. If the navigation thumbnail is 03.jpg with its size reset in the HTML, then when we click it and move to page 3, the image (03.jpg) is already preloaded.

This is the old trick of loading image 03.jpg resized to 1 pixel x 1 pixel, except in this case we actually get some use out of it.

BTW, tedster posted [webmasterworld.com] this little gem in 2000. It preloads the graphic for the next page into the browser cache, and if properly placed (after the end of the page's HTML), loads the graphic after the page load completes. I tried it and it works great, even on NN4.

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--

nextslide=new Image()
nextslide.src="filename.ext"

//-->
</script>

This downloads the image "filename.ext" to the cache.

The LINK tag doesn't seem to be very widely supported. It preloads the next page; I don't know whether that includes images. Put in the HEAD section:

<link rel="next" href="pagename.html">