Auto-play and web design - remind me to never...

...link to news video from KPSP ever again.

I did it in this post, and found out that the video auto-plays. Kind of irritating to be listening to DJ Shadow's "Midnight in a Perfect World" on last.fm, go to your blog (with the last few day's worth of posts) and then suddenly have a mashup of DJ Shadow with a commercial for office furniture or whatever.

Now I see why America Needs Fatima didn't embed the video.

Auto-play just is not friendly. As Gaurabh Mathure stated:

Not everyone likes to arrive at a page and be surprised by a video playing on screen... more importantly if the user has been surfing non-rich media content for a while he has also forgotten what the volume his notebook/pc speakers is. Sometimes when a video autoplays it causes the user to be startled as he might be in a cafe/library/office, and does not want to attract too much attention.

Therefore I think you should convince the client that it might not create the best user experience to have the video in autoplay mode.

And there are other offenders. G. Jason Head:

The first example that came to mind to me is ESPN.com. I visit the site daily as a user (i/e I leave my developer hat off when I get there). They have a video box on their main page that always starts automatically - and I absolutely hate it. Reasons being - I'm busy reading whats new on the front page and the video is always a distraction.

Will Evans:

90% of the time, I work, surf, write with my headphones on, with the music playing. Autoplay overides what I am listening to, usually at a volume much more than my music, and in somecases have literally cause pain in my ears - that is why I will never go to MySpace - ever.

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