• A cheap rip-off from the iPod (sorry I couldn’t help myself)
• A gaming console
• A new Roy of the Rovers sketch about a football playing robot

I’m sure you can think of a few of your own. It will take Channel 4 a bit less effort to get people to understand their offering. Meanwhile if you speak to a few of your less tech-savvy (licence-paying) friends and family, you’ll find that some of them aren’t sure what iPlayer is. The BBC now has to spend a lot more of your money explaining the concept.

[A previous post that I wrote about images on catch up TV gets most of its referrals from the search term "Silent Witness Catch up". I've added a little comment on that post to help those people on their way.]

So what’s this got to do with your website?

A lot of people who haven’t used iPlayer yet will think it’s a great invention. They’ve seen the adverts, they just didn’t understand what it was. So to them, the concept is hidden behind the name.

Have a look around your own website for links and headings that don’t make instant sense to someone with little experience of them. Your users will not click all the links that don’t make sense to them just to find out what they are. Instead they will just ignore the links that don’t make sense. If they need to read a paragraph before the heading makes sense, then the heading is not doing its job.

Intranets are full of these bad links

Intranets are a haven for this type of mistake. In the corporate world, Item 1 on the agenda for the steering group of any new initiative is to think of a bizarre name to ‘brand’ the concept. This is the name that will make it totally unfindable on the intranet. So the employee looking for the company’s flexible working policy will miss the link to ‘Super-Flexo’ or whatever it ends up being called.

“But we’ve communicated it, so people will understand it” is the common response from the project team. Well BBC have ‘communicated’ the iPlayer and lots of people still don’t know what it is.

Describe first, name second

On your website / intranet you should use links and headings that are descriptive before introducing the name the organisation has decided to give it. In a perfect world the name would be descriptive in the first place. But getting your colleagues to think in this way is easier said than done. After all iPlayer is a cooler sounding name than Watch Online, even if it is unhelpful.

Use trigger words

The thing that makes Watch Online such a good name is that it is probably a trigger word. I’d love to hear that Channel 4 found these words in their search logs and decided to use it as the name for the service. However I think it’s probably more to do with them also making archive clips available. Something that Scottish Television did some time ago. They just didn’t choose such a good name.

Disclaimer: I don’t hate BBC iPlayer

I’m actually a very big fan of both the BBC and the iPlayer I just think it has a silly name. If we were comparing interfaces rather than names then iPlayer would win easily.

Introducing trigger words

I’ve used the term ‘trigger images’ because they work in a very similar way to Jared Spool’s trigger words. He suggests using the exact words your users are thinking about so that they pull a trigger in users’ heads.

Trigger images

TV catch-up sites like BBC iPlayer and ITV Catch-up (a much better name than iPlayer by the way) can often have many programmes listed on any one page. Most people scan through the page looking for something they want to watch. They will not read every programme title. So the images help them quickly find something.

When done well, the images pull a trigger of recognition in the users mind. This can be recognition of someone or something they like or it could help them when looking for a specific programme. It only really works when the images mean something to the user instantly.

BBC iPlayer

Catch-up websites often get this wrong. I know that creating these images is quite an overhead but a little extra thought could improve usability. Here is a example from BBC iPlayer that shows both good and bad practice.

The image for Heroes is obvious but Silent Witness is not.

The central characters from ‘Heroes’ make it easy to find for those who watch it. However the ‘Silent Witness’ image is less obvious. One of the central characters is featured but she is turning away from the camera and both the characters heads are small.

People who want to watch ‘Silent Witness’ are still going to be able to find it. But they will be able to do so easier if a better image is used. People who are just browsing may overlook ‘Silent Witness’.

ITV Catch-up

ITV Catch-up has both good and bad examples as well

The example above shows that ITV are guilty of the same thing. Let’s take the X-Factor image for instance. They’ve used the central characters, the judges, but they are difficult to recognise. Their heads are very small and the image is quite heavily compressed, so it’s pixelated. Corrie and Emmerdale are a bit better though.

Guidelines

A simple set of guidelines could help the issue:

• If the images are pixelated, then reduce the compression so that they aren’t.
• Use something recognisable like a main character or celebrity guest. It isn’t important for the user to understand the scene, just the subject or characters.
• Make the face or object clear by cropping the image before shrinking it. The important bit will then be large enough to recognise.

The subject of the image should then be easily recognisable. If it still isn’t, then consider using a different image. I’ve had a go at the X Factor image as an example. Much better isn’t it?

Some cropping improves the image

If you don’t watch ‘The X Factor’ then this image might mean nothing to you. But those who do, will find this image easier to recognise than 4 tiny heads.