#1: Autoplay This

Good afternoon, good morning, or good evening, whatever time you’re listening to us. This is the Drunken UX podcast. The Drunken UX podcast is brought to you by Gas Mark 8 at gasmark8.com. I am your host Michael Fienen. I am a web developer, analytics, and something else guy – I don’t know what – but for now let’s call me a host. And I have with me on the other side of this microphone-

Only your third? Okay, I’ll catch up here in a second. So if you are tuning into Drunken UX for the first time you can follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/drunkenux or twitter.com/drunkenux. We kept it simple for you. This evening I can tell you that I am having a delicious and well-aged Aberfledy 12. I’m on… I don’t know I lost count, one two, two-and-a-half, three. I don’t know. After a while you keep adding to the glass even though it’s not really empty, so let’s see what happens. Aaron, Aaron, remind me what are we talking about tonight?

Jesus Christ whose idea was this and I don’t know and I mean either the episode or the videos themselves either one of them kind of pisses me off at this point

okay so and I’m gonna group something else in here cuz it’s it’s kind of a video kind of not but it goes to the root of the problem I think that I don’t torrent I don’t download things illegally I’m sure you don’t either

I’m sure none of our listeners do they have no idea what we’re talking about but my I’m told, I am told here, that one of the things that really annoys people is when they are visiting their favorite download site of some sort and they click on the latest episode of I don’t know what’s what’s popular these days is

Teen Mom?

okay they click on the latest episode of Game of Teen Mom, season 11 episode 42, and as they are trying to download it they get this: (in falsetto, breathy, voice) “Hello! If you’re over 18 please click on, you know, parts of my body to play this game. I promise it’s a safe game – but if you click right, I’ll make some nice noises for you”

“Our kingdom is in danger, please save us!” and of course you’ve got like 27 tabs open like we all do

and you don’t know which ones making the noise you just want to download your TV show and all I can think about is my wife’s trying to sleep down the hallway right now what the fuck is up with that

oh my god I don’t I don’t know what to do with these people anymore because, I don’t know, I’ve been using the website since the 90s and we haven’t had this problem until recently because video used to be a thing that like you you know you couldn’t do – we had .. what do we have … we had real video, right real videos the first in terms of

That was how you got video to people and it was like “Do you have a 14.4k modem? Then here’s the one you get to see that is the size of a postage stamp! It was a a scarce resource right?

It was something that you used for very special things, but anymore — no they just kind of stick that shit anywhere they can get away with it

Oh that’s — there we go, that’s the sound effect we needed.

It’s… it’s so weird and it’s it’s worth you know it’s a little different than you know the audio– autoplay issue but it is the audio thing and that’s where I think, I’m gonna end up coming back to a lot during this conversation – the video isn’t really the problem, right? It’s the audio, it’s that cognitive load, that it stresses a web user and and what they’re trying to accomplish

Right, right — your eyes are multi-channel, right? And your ears are not: everything that comes in, just comes in. So and when I think about cognitive load I come back to like… who was ah… Steve Krug, right?

Everything that he talks about in Don’t Make Me Think, and when you stress users and add friction to any kind of experience

you know what’s wild about that as well at least to me is when we think about cognitive load and UX stress and friction and in interactions when you are Autoplaying something on a webpage you have that effect not only of pissing off the user that’s on your page but you’re pissing off users on other pages. If I’ve got 12 tabs open and I’m not on your tab and you distract me from the thing that I’m doing

So it’s not that I’m gonna blame them, but it’s definitely going to interrupt what I am doing on that site

Yeah! It’s very much an attention whore kind of thing, right? When we think about how users perceive this, right? It gets into a lot of stuff about not just the cognitive load but the technical load of

Yeah we start thinking about how pages load. I — Man how long have we spent talking about load times on web pages and making sure stuff happens as quickly as humanly possible

Right! This never happens when we start talking about video though. When video, when you have a video player, and especially if you’ve got one that is focused on Autoplaying something, I feel like all of that goes out the window.

The funny part is you’ve got folks you’ve got two different types of folks aren’t the ones who are like YouTube, who if you embed a YouTube video, it generally doesn’t autoplay but it it does load all of the player data asynchronously so you got all the Chrome, you’ve got all of the stuff is loading in parallel which is fine

At least asynchronous doesn’t generally interrupt the flow… it does in some cases–

Yeah with YouTube I’m thinking about stuff like, if you are running just, say, a general eCommerce site though, and you’ve got say a big autoplay video in your header…

I’ve got a site up that I work on, that is set up like that, that they wanted this video and they’re using a canned WordPress theme to pull it off. The WordPress theme that they’re using doesn’t have a fallback of any kind…

Yeah! So while that video is loading, and the player is loading, you just sort of have this gray background

“Hang out! Wait a second; We’ll get there eventually, don’t worry”

And then we’ve got the assholes like CNN. Sorry, CNN, you guys piss me off

Load their video asynchronously, so that you think you’re safe, but you’re not — you realize you’re not safe about ten seconds into the page, once you’ve already scrolled down — you’re scanning that content and now the audio hits you. Now you know something else is going on; that’s almost worse to me, in those instances.

Text overhead is literally bytes, at that point, and so when you’re you’ve got that, you’ve got it in front of you and you’re already engaged with that content; you know, how many years have we talked about this idea of “content being king,” right? Everything comes down to the text on the page, that’s what people come for and video was this great idea, and we started looking at putting it on a page… then we started Autoplaying, then we started using it for advertisements — it’s, it’s like you were saying earlier, that: when a video starts playing and then an ad starts playing…

What’s… I don’t know off the top of my head, the ad provider who does the little right corner pop-ups — it had the little videos in them?

I genuinely don’t know off the top of my head with that… I know that they are awful human beings for making me put up with that and that idea that okay you’ve got a video on your website that I’m looking at… I think, I may be wrong, I think it’s C-NET that does this, that uses both services. They have Auto playing video, but then they have this little video ad pop-up; Neither of them are muted, mind you!

So now you’re you’re trying to give me genuine video content, but you also have an ad on your page that is audio, and not muted.

I can trust nothing anybody is giving me at this point because I don’t know who is, what’s the ad, what’s the content, what’s the point. I get angry. And then I get over it. But the reality is that that’s what’s happening, right? We’re pissing people off.

It makes me think, there was a tweet that went out a little while back, Sarah L Jaffe; I hope I’m saying her name right the quote that she gave on that I think sums it up she says:

I mean, where are the tweets that say: “Holy shit news site, I am so glad that I clicked on that link and you started that video for me the second I landed on it. I am so thrilled that I consumed your content that much faster.” Nobody says that.

You know, that goes back to the heart of it, right? That’s why this has become such a big deal – because you have managers who care about view numbers and you have advertisers that care about eyeballs, and they don’t care if they piss people off because they’re pretty confident that those same people will come back at some other time. They won’t not consume that information. I would argue that that’s not true though.

Hey, and if there’s one guy I’m gonna trust about video views it’s John and Hank Green. Nerdfighteria for life man. This is episode number one in case anybody didn’t catch, and I have no doubt that John and Hank green will be tuning in for this episode. I’m glad you decided to tune in to us three years after we became famous. Now if that happens three years after we’ve been doing this and we’re famous that’s gonna be really prescient. Okay, thinking about pissing people off, because I like this thread. Okay, I work from home – it’s not as great as people think it is. I do get to listen to a lot of music. I listen to a ton of music. What if I’m trying to do that, I’m focused I’m coding, and you interrupt me with autoplay video. You don’t know what I’m doing. You’re polluting my audio environment, you know, we talk about audio is one channel. Whatever you pump into my audiosphere I’m having to take in and you are polluting my experience.

If you want to leave this game and you’re over 18, please click on my chest right now.

To bring it down a little bit though, what if I’ve got a disability? What if I’m somebody who has motor control issues and you’ve decided to autoplay that video and now I have to go through whatever system I’m using – whether it’s joystick, keyboard controls, whatever the case may be, mouth controls, and now I have to navigate back to your video controls to turn off the video that I didn’t want playing in the first place.

Flash video? I’m pretty sure that’s a no, because I’m hoping they don’t even parse flash at all to begin with.

Or the real threat here is let’s say I’m a deaf user, right, and then something starts playing. I don’t know. Students right now, we’re coming up on the end of the year. Actually, we’re recording this at the end of the year, you’ll be hearing it just after. If I’m a deaf student, I’m studying for finals, I’m sitting in my nice quiet library, I’ve got my laptop open – I don’t know that it’s not muted necessarily – and I click a link to see something and I hear, “If you’re over the age of 18 please click wherever you want to.” Right? Now, he’s just trying to read an article, man, and the whole library thinks he’s a pervert.

The little speaker icon in Chrome, while nice and a great step, is absolutely not enough.

And to the web developers that let this happen, to you guys that aren’t standing up their managers, that aren’t willing to fight this fight, let me be very clear that it is an accessibility spec. It’s like under five seconds, you can play like up to five seconds or something like that. Beyond that you you’re in violation of accessibility standards to begin with and you’re putting yourselves on the hook for that if I’m somebody who is having trouble with that as a disabled person. If I file a lawsuit against you, guess what? You have no excuse you have no way out of that.

Shrug emoji.

But yeah, I I think there’s one more disability and that’s just being a web developer. Where you have like 57 tabs open at once – because I’ve got 20 tabs open on reCAPTCHA documentation, I’ve got 14 GitHub pages open, and now one of these pages is is making sound. It’s Where’s Waldo. It’s a Where’s Waldo of annoying audio

That’s a great thing too, when you combine that with the previous example of the audio conferencing. I have sat in on more video calls and I can even count where we’re in the middle of having a conversation and somebody shared a link to a blog. Somebody has tried to say, “Hey look at this article.” Something. And somebody has clicked on it, you know, while we’re in the conference, because any number of us are just sitting at home at the time, just trying to multitask. And you hear over that video conference that audio. And so not only are they embarrassed, they’re distracted, but now everybody is distracted that’s in that meeting as well, because now we’re trying to figure out whose audio is bleeding through on top of it.

I feel bad because I don’t use headphones, but I’d like to think that my microphone is set up in a way that doesn’t have that problem. But we complain about auto-playing videos, and the videos really aren’t the problem – it’s the audio. It’s the audio that makes all the difference there in terms of what makes it okay and not okay.

YouTube’s done it right I think. They are part of the exception that defies the rule, so-to-speak, you know, if I’m using Twitter, if I’m using Facebook, and I click on a link, links are not contextual. The link tells me nothing about what I’m going to except the title, and because I’ve been using the web for as long as I have, maybe this will change in 10 or 20 years, but right now when I click on a link I expect a page with text, or photos, or something. When I click on YouTube I expect video, if I click on Vimeo I expect video. So I know contextually that their links are going to present me with something else that is different. If I click on W-K-R-P-S or whatever-

Well I do now! They have punished me into knowing.

But when you click any virtually anywhere else you don’t expect that. That’s really part of this problem. YouTube gets away with it because you have the expectation and you have control. You have full control on that page over what’s going on, down to whether it auto plays another video after you’re done. Maybe the only time that becomes maybe a bit of an exception, right, is maybe if you you’re an audio user of YouTube and that’s all that you’re doing on there. But even then, right? You’ve you’ve asked for it, you’re requesting that. You know what you’re getting.

If I send you an Amazon link that says “Blue Yeti Model USB 100” and you click on that Amazon link, what do you expect to get?

Right. I don’t expect to land on there and have- a lot of Amazon, especially big products, have like video information on them now. But they don’t assault you with that. They say, here it is in the little panel. You can click on that if you want it. But you expect to get a product page that it’s just waiting for you to engage with it. I come back to CNN on this, and any news site really, but when I click on a news article, I’m thinking at least in my brain I’m gonna read a story. I know that’s not true, I know somewhere in my brain, yeah they’re gonna throw a stupid frickin’ video at me. CNN’s problem though is that they’re really inconsistent about it. And this is where YouTube has an expectation set, they’ve made that promise – “We are a video website. You click on our link you get a video.” CNN has not promised me that. CNN only has promised me that they will give me news. The format that news takes I have no way of predicting.

It’s sometimes a video, but sometimes not. Sometimes it’s a photo gallery. Sometimes they send me off to their sports site, which is a totally different site entirely, even though it still uses a CNN link. What about local news though? Local news is what I think ultimately drives me up the wall because I pay attention to a lot of local news.

The reverse of that is what I’ve seen a lot of least here with our local news. It’s all transcript. The articles themselves are literally word-for-word transcripts of what’s in the video. Good for accessibility. Why are you auto playing my video then? By the time your video has finished loading and the news anchor has made the introduction, I’ve already scanned the text content.

I am 100% on board with Morgan Freeman as well.

I would be alright with that.

I don’t think the local guys here can afford them. Local news has that problem that… you know… they don’t care, right? That’s really… you can tell, there is no love, there is no heart in any of that content. They’re putting it up there because they have a website, and they don’t care about putting enough money into it to make it interesting or different or otherwise make since.

Oh, I have no doubt. When a news organization owns 20 stations, they buy one CMS and they all share that platform

It’s so indicative of what happens when you let the tools dictate the behavior. It’s very, very indicative, I think, of that. They’re like, here’s this platform, here’s how we use it.

So for instance, at least here, and I don’t know off the top of my head who owns the local news stations here, they have a CMS of some kind. It’s garbage to begin with, but we’ll let that slide. But the video content they have uses playlist functionality, so if you go to a news site – and I don’t mind sometimes letting it autoplay, because I do have an interest in watching the newscasts and I don’t sit down at 5 o’clock or 6 o’clock and watch them sometimes – what I do have a problem with is they then go into playlist mode where after I have watched the latest episode of the intersection that they’re tearing up and when to avoid that part of town, they then jump into a donation that was given to the local hospital.

What does that have to do with anything that I’m interested in.

Facebook has it right. I think Facebook’s doing a good job.

If you’ve interacted with it, a) they keep the video in view, that’s interesting.

I think Facebook… it’s still weird. It’s still like, in my head I think when I’m scrolling I’ve keyed into the audio and I don’t think about the the video portion of it at that point. So when it pops to the side, it definitely is jarring a little bit. And Facebook itself has a number of issues layout-wise that I think we could do a whole episode on. But I think at least they’re muting their videos. They autoplay everything now, I mean any video you see is autoplay, but they at least are muting them and saying, we know that a the bandwidth isn’t that much – not for desktops anymore. On the mobile app it doesn’t do that it, doesn’t autoplay them on the mobile app. But the other thing, and this is sort of a weird side effect, but it’s something I’ve seen a lot more and I love it and I hate it, but videos are burning captions in because they know that people are home muting them.

No, like if you think about the Now This or the BuzzFeed videos and a lot of the humor videos and stuff or all these Tasty or cooking videos – they are hard captioning the videos that come up. Because they know… and I’m assuming Facebook gives maybe some kind of analytics on mute and unmute, maybe they don’t I don’t know I don’t post video on Facebook so I don’t know. As a result, it’s a much better experience for me. My hearing is great, I have no hearing problems, but I don’t want to hear your video. But I don’t mind scrolling past and seeing the text, and I have watched a lot of videos because of that. I think. It has enticed me. The reason I think I don’t like it is because I just personally don’t like burnt in captions. I would rather see it captioned the right way.

It’s a step in the right direction though, because if you’re writing the captions to burn them in, it’s a very short step to getting those captions available to any platform as an accessibility compliance type thing. You know it’s a short step, I think, to that point. I wish and I’m like 98% sure that the Facebook videos do actually support captioning, but that’s not getting used. People aren’t in, you know, utilizing that piece of it if that’s the case, as far as I know. That’s something I should, but now I’m about four drinks into this so give me a break. If this is the first episode you’ve listened to, if it’s the 12th episode you’ve listened to, guys, this is what it’s about.

I’m very sorry to the Green brothers. This is how I stay awesome, so you’re gonna have to just accept that.

To me anyway, I think what part of the exception to the rule we’ve talked about, you know the news sites, we’ve talked about media, Facebook, YouTube, but the one that stands out as sort of a weird outlier is Netflix, right? Netflix has Auto playing video. They do this little video promo like if you’re sitting on the Browse page and you go to… why?

It’s maybe, what, two or three months I think they’ve started doing this. I’m sensitive to it because I use a home theater PC, so when I watch Netflix I’m not using a Fire Stick or Chromecast or anything like that. I’m literally using a computer on my TV and so it’s Chrome. It just thinks it’s a web page, and we’ll pull up Netflix and start scrolling down that page and that promo will start playing for Bright or Easy or whatever show is currently popular they’re trying to plug. For some reason, I don’t know why, like if you would ask me objectively is that something that would annoy me, I would say no. But having experienced it, I find that it’s actually incredibly annoying.

So here’s where the opposite, like Netflix employs a completely inverse rule to this, which I find just ironic in this case, which is, I don’t mind that they autoplay episodes. If I’m watching one episode, let me watch the next one. Once you’ve watched, what is it, three episodes, then they stop you. Then they don’t autoplay anymore. And I totally get why, I understand why they do that, but I do find it humorous.

Sorry, are you still there? Are you really that sad and lonely? Yes, I am, thank you!

It was a lot. It was to me. I’m sorry, I don’t know who watches it, I’m sorry it was too many. I don’t know, to bring this home a little bit, I think about what people can do and how we address this as web developers and, you know, we can’t rely on Chrome to do our fighting for us. Chrome is releasing now the update, in fact I think it just rolled out if I remember my news right, where they started by notifying you, right? That audio was playing on a tab, they gave you the little icon. Now they’re gonna just stop it entirely, they’re not gonna allow auto-playing videos. Apple’s been doing this for a while in Safari and on mobile devices, they’ve just said you know what, no. If you have video that’s gonna start playing, we’re gonna programmatically stop it. But we can’t rely on that, right? That’s the wrong answer, I feel like. HTML5 has a spec in it for autoplay, and the design is that you can go into your browser then and say I am okay with allowing people to do that or I’m not okay with allowing people to do that. I’m a big fan of opting in, at the same time I feel like that’s easily abused because, I don’t know, I haven’t seen a good implementation of it yet at the browser level that says: I want to allow HTML5 autoplay videos on this site.

Like whitelisting it. Because I feel like if I whitelist it on CNET, and the little corner pop-up comes up, does that count as on site if it’s reading it in from the third party? I don’t know. As a user I don’t know and as a developer I haven’t tested it.

I have a huge worry here of getting that dreaded call from like Manager X that says “I’m visiting that page and that video isn’t playing” and spending four hours of my life trying to figure out why the video was broken for her only to find out that she had the setting in her browser changed. The code was right, the settings were right, you know? Everything I did was right, but because she had disallowed it and didn’t realize that, because you know it’s gonna happen. You know that that is something that people do. It’s like zoom, right? Allowing somebody to zoom a page. I have thought that so many times where people have said well this doesn’t look right. If you have pixel pusher type developer or designers. But then they zoom something in.

I can’t deal with that. I don’t know what the answer is outside of just encouraging people to say no a lot.

I know that there are reasons a lot of these companies have auto playing video. I get it. Well they think they have reasons, let me put it that way. They have reasons they think are true. And I know that web developers sometimes get brought into fights that it’s a hill they don’t want to die on,

because it’s the difference between their paycheck or not at that point. But I feel like there is at least some requirement to sit down and say: Okay, I I’m not gonna say no, but I’m gonna show you that people hate this, or I am gonna say no but I’m gonna track how people use this and I’m not gonna tell you I’m doing that.

But it goes back to the example you gave, earlier right? The the company that was doing the video website that discovered that by auto-playing videos they got a huge jump in the attention span people had, you know… everybody’s circumstances are gonna be very different on this stuff and you owe it to yourselves not necessarily to say no blindly; Say no where it makes sense, but also it’s one of those “trust but verify” situations and don’t be afraid to sit down and say “if I’m gonna play this video, let’s record the data for that and see: what does our bounce rate look like–

One of the things, and here’s something, and I think about I come back to CNN because I do read seeing in a lot… I don’t… I know people bitch about how it’s a liberal whatever source of… “fake news,” okay whatever — I’m reading about SpaceX. I don’t think there’s much of a liberal agenda applied for the SpaceX story. But I think about when I go there and I have this problem of listening to or reading a story, and then hearing a video playing the angle there that I would take as a developer is: I want to measure scroll depth as it applies to the exit rate

Think about that for a second; Especially because they put the video at the top of the page; it’s the first thing that’s there and I have to scroll past it to get into the text anyways. So if I know that 80% of my users are halfway down my page before the video starts playing, doesn’t that give you something really useful to use?

I think that’s the best advice, and I think that’s gonna be advice people hear a lot is: “Trust Your Data,” and don’t be afraid to get data that disagrees with you but, you know, yeah at least look for it. And don’t go in biased, you know, don’t set up your data to fail; don’t not track something because you’re worried that it might conflict with what–

Right now, you know, people scan well. We hit a page full of text, we can burn down that page of text, pull out the important chunks, and scan it, and be out of that page in 15 seconds. I’m not gonna sit there watch a three-minute video.

If somebody stays on your site longer and doesn’t convert in a meaningful way: that’s failure. That means they’ve spent — they really wanted to do something and they tried really hard to do it and if you don’t have a conversion number for that person, you failed them.

So that’s the message folks. I think, I think it’s clear from we hate auto-playing videos; I think it’s clear from you, that you hate auto-playing videos

I hope that, I think that, at the end of the day, we can do something about them

We can be better. At the end of the day, we can be better. Or encourage each other to be better.