Just today, The Huffington Post appears to have slightly changed the way it delivers photo slideshows - at least for the time being. Slideshows on The Post are mostly included in the body of articles and are usually preceded by some brief introductory text. Occasionally, The Post will run a slideshow at the very top of their frontpage, as is the case right now. Formerly, the slideshow element included one large main photo, room for a cutline and a series of grey dots that represented the other photos in the set. By clicking a dot or one of the arrows on the side, a new photo was loaded.
The change seems to have added thumbnails to this system, as the grey dots have been replaced by small previews of the available pictures.
Thankfully, this photo player works well; the pictures load quickly and, because the element is not a bulky Flash object, users can even right-click and manipulate the photo at will. Perhaps most importantly, I'm not forced to reload the entire page when I want to see a new photo. The addition of thumbnails is a welcome change for me. Chances are I'm going to look at every photo in the series anyway, but were I to come back to the slideshow to try and find a specific shot, I no longer have to scan through every photo a second time. It's just a little more user friendly, and being friendlier to users is never bad business.
See the new slideshow format here, and the old one here.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
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1 comments:
Hmm. I think I like the old one. Great that you caught it on the very day.
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