A Way Back

Simplifying SlideShare Player

SlideShare to slides is what Youtube is to videos. Lots of valuable content by invaluable presenters can be found there. I’ve rebuilt the SlideShare Player following Joshua Porter’s strategy of Metrics driven design.

Following are 5 randomly selected presentations along with statistics (as on 8th Jan’11 at 8pm IST):

Slides	Views	Favorite	Tweets	fShare	flike	Embed	Download
CSS Bloat	1,270	9	4	38	0	0	12
The Dragonfly Effect	12,333	28	20	36	106	14	91
SMOKE	120,817	291	475	1,537	5,863	284	8,165
Keynote Kung-Fu	58,793	262	134	144	135	81	1,430
The Brand Gap	909,875	5,672	271	495	1,222	1,901	26
Total	1,103,088	6,262	904	2,250	7,326	2,280	9,724
Average	100	0.56	0.08	0.2	0.66	0.2	0.88

In the standard SlideShare player, the user-action buttons are split into 3 sections i.e. top, left and bottom of the player. In addition to this, there are too many player controls shown upfront which can be reduced to basic PREV and NEXT only.

Standard SlideShare Player

I’ve redesigned the player based on the stats for various user actions from the above table. Play control is altogether omitted because user will need to stop and read content that varies from slide to slide.

Redesigned SlideShare Player

Based on Principle 2 (Keep it Lightweight » Hover-reveal tools) from Designing Web Interfaces, the First Slide and Last Slide buttons are hidden by default and shown on demand (mouse hover). Following are 3 states of interactions shown for the player controls:

1. Default status

2. When user hovers over PREV button First slide button will appear

3. When user hovers over NEXT button Last slide button will appear

While working on the standard player on SlideShare website, I also worked on the following embedded version.

All Share buttons (twitter, facebook and email) are moved to a menu. Number of elements from player bar are reduced and additional full screen mode is added.

I believe that this redesign can serve as ground for SlideShare to create something better.

References

• Designing the Moment, Chapter 15 – Standardizing Playback Controls
• Designing Web Interfaces
• 13 Video player UIs – Signal vs. Noise

5 Comments

Add your comment

• 
  # Ryan
  says on January 26

  Nice work Amrinder, new one is really nice and simple. I can get some inspiration from it for my game player.

  Thanks 🙂

• 
  # Prashant
  says on January 26

  nice work man… its really simple now, just like new youtube player 🙂

• 
  # Joe Mako
  says on January 26

  Your redesign is great for clicking to change each slide, but what about the “Play” button?

• 
  # Kaushik Panchal
  says on January 27

  Looks beautiful and easy to use.
  Nice work 🙂

• 
  # Ben Jacob
  says on January 27

  That is much better, Clean and intelligent.. The Official Slide Share is visibly a child play.. 😀