At least Snap Preview has options to turn it off, at least temporarily. With AnswerTips, it seems you’re stuck with the annoying windows.

I’m on a laptop and quickly click on the scroll bars to move around in text which doesn’t respond to up/down arrows, but stupid AnswerTips thinks I’m double clicking for it!!!

They should provide a “turn-off” option and fix the ridiculous bug of people who double click elsewhere than on words!

Otherwise, I agree with you that it doesn’t add a lot of other functions if its just another link.

Check it out here.
 http://entrepreneur.com.sg/wordpress/?p=42

Thanks, Liz!

Since you’re on the topic, here’s the latest webmaster tool from Answers.com: AnswerTips. AnswerTips are small bubbles of information triggered by double-clicking any word on an AnswerTips-enabled page, designed to keep your readers from wandering off your site when encountering unfamiliar words or terms. Unlike Snap, AnswerTips are only summoned when actively double-clicking on any word so they are not automatic.

If you’d like to offer suggestions, check out the details here: http://www.answers.com/main/answertips.jsp. You can reach me at lizc at answers.com.

Liz
 Answers.com

Again like SNAP this can either be a useful or a waste of time. It did not work properly for me and to be honest I did not rate it. This is different because instead of the page view, it gives info in a simple list, it has a few more features as well.

If they were more light weight they could be good and especially for slow modem users.

My thoughts of SPA

I entirely agree that, for some visitors, the widget can provide a benefit - added incentive to visit a site or added information to influence their decision. My comments are about my own experience with it as a person browsing the ‘net. And, in that position, I find it personally irritating. It’s an issue of personal taste. This isn’t about whether or not the information is useful.

As a publisher you have a responsibility to your audience. If I was to attempt boiling down the science of audience research I would say this comes down to a combination of knowing who they are, what they want and what they need.

This is absolutely true. And I think there are perfectly fair arguments both for and against the use of the Snap Preview Anywhere tool. You’ve presented the advantages - providing additional highlight of the fact that this block of text leads to another site and providing information about that site. I would argue, however, that the added complexity to the site could create a greater barrier to use for some populations.

I note, in the Use Case you reference that you’re now making the SPA functionality “opt-in”:

The Solution: Today, Friday Feb 9th, we released the Snap Preview Anywhere badge, which will allow site owners to install SPA on their site but let the end-users enable (opt-in) the functionality themselves.

This is great news; and I’m truly glad to hear this. I haven’t followed the progress of the usability issues of SPA and was unaware of these issues. As I’ve said, this blog posts was a personal reaction.

I certainly appreciate Snap’s efforts, and find the search engine itself to be quite useful. It’s being barraged by extraneous images, slower loading times, and the active clutter it creates on a page which turns me off the preview anywhere tool.

By the way, I’ve edited your comment to correct the URL pointing to the Preview Anywhere Use Case - I want my visitors to have the best chance to read both perspectives! The Use Case is a really great read - it provides a lot of very useful information.

Thanks again,
Joe Dolson

Snap Preview Anywhere has never claimed to provide *all* the information needed, but rather to provide richer-than-what-is-currently-available cues to what lies ahead.

As a publisher you have a responsibility to your audience. If I was to attempt boiling down the science of audience research I would say this comes down to a combination of knowing who they are, what they want and what they need.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Is your audience *exclusively* made up of experienced Internet users that read your blog using browsers that support tabbed browsing (essentially IE7, Firefox, Opera or Safari)?
• Are you *not* interested in attracting and retaining readers that doesn’t fit this narrow user profile?
• Are your hyperlinks blue and underlined?
• Do you consistently follow “properâ€? markup protocol, defining the target and title of the link within the opening and closing of the anchor tag?

If so, your audience is likely to find the usefulness of SPA marginal. If so, your audience is trained to pick up on the subtle cues already provided by the browser framework — the browser status bar and anchor link title attribute provide these users with most of what they need to determine where links are pointing. If so, the cost of occasional erroneous clicks are often mitigated through the use of advanced browser functionality such as tabbed browsing…

However, if the user profile is too narrow for your taste or ambition, I believe that by implementing Snap Preview Anywhere you would in fact offer ALL your readers MORE information to base their decision on which links to click or not to click, REDUCING the number of unwanted outbound clicks mid-read and, in effect, IMPROVE their ability to focus on YOUR content, or the content you link to that they TRULY wanted to visit.

If you are interested in an alternative perspective and an in-depth discussion of SPA — both its strengths and weaknesses — I encourage you to read our blog post The Snap Preview Anywhere Use Case.

Cheers.
–
Erik Wingren
Snap UX Research