One thing that can become really frustrating is when you go a site only to find that they have a long Flash introduction. Your options are to sit and wait for the 10 or 15 second introduction to finish, or you could search the page for the “skip intro” button which is never in the same spot on every site. On the bright side, at least there is the option to skip the intro, but it would be nice if there was one universal spot to put it on every site.
Instead of searching all over the page, what if you were able to just click the “skip intro” button right from your search engine? Google has now added a new feature and if a site has a “skip intro” button, they will show it in the search results. When you click on it you’ll be taken to the homepage without having to sit through the introduction. Nice, isn’t it?
I should say it’s nice for the people visiting the site who really don’t want to have to wait to see an introduction. For developers though, it’s not so nice. There’s a reason they have an introduction and they probably spent a good amount of time making it.
As Google Blogoscoped mentions, this is a feature that could have been around for some time that is now just getting noticed, or it could be new. We did come across some sites that had an introduction, but Google didn’t provide the “skip intro” option. It appears as though a site must have the words “enter site” on the introduction page that is in HTML in order for Google to pick it up.
Thanks for the tip Cory!
Source: Google Blogoscoped
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Go Google!
If developers are annoyed that their intros are being skipped then they should take some time to learn a little about design and realise that intros offer nothing but annoyance to plenty of visitors and 100% of returning visitors who will have seen it before. People didn’t put up with on-load MIDI and they shouldn’t put up with flash intros just because they look cooler.
Oooh… on-load MIDI. Boy how I hated that. That was a pretty big trend several years ago, probably in the late 90’s. I find MySpace profiles that automatically start playing music just as annoying as the sites that had the on-load MIDI!
“For developers though, it’s not so nice. There’s a reason they have an introduction and they probably spent a good amount of time making it.”
Since this reason is rarely worth the introduction, I think it *is* nice for the developers. I hope it will finally teach them that using intros is generally bad design and will likely cost them visitors.
Or, to put it another way: less is more.
In this situation, absolutely!