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
# Ryan
says on January 26
# Prashant
says on January 26
# Joe Mako
says on January 26
# Kaushik Panchal
says on January 27
# Ben Jacob
says on January 27