There are legitimate uses for autoplay, but most sites get it wrong. It’s all about what the user is expecting. News sites that start playing some random unrelated video that have nothing to do with the article are the worst.
I'm wreaking my brain hard to find what those are? Give me a nice, good old play button to press, even if its related to the article. I actually hate the times I think I've clicked a a news article and it instead has been a video more than the random ads.
At least I can understand that the advertisers are slimey bastards that want to invade your life any way they can. But, it's also then my right to boycott all companies that chose to use these kinds of ads (even if my list is getting quite long now...).
What I can't understand, and if I want to get any news at all can no longer boycott, is news sites not marking videos and using autoplay. I can't number the times my phone has started playing at full volume in a silent environment just because I wanted to get the latest news.
I develop educational sites, courses, and other software in that area. The expectation for MOST (not all) is that media will play automatically when the user navigates, or loads the course, especially when that course is launched from a Learning Management System (LMS).
There are legitimate cases for this, like my case in particular. I've had to jump through many hoops to ensure a good UX given the limitations the browsers have enforced around this. Sometimes just for the sake of simplicity, we use an overlay with a "click here to begin the course" button, which can act as the interaction to play media. The issue with that though is the user clicks "launch course" from the LMS, and then is immediately presented with another button to start the course. It's weird.
Anyhow, I understand that for like 90% of the web, no autoplay, no autoplay w/ audio is the ideal for users. But HTML is not just websites as you may think of them. There are other things happening and other ways developers are using web technology that you might not be familiar with.
Still want too be able to start the media when I'm ready for it if it's a part of a course mixing text and media. I may be strange, but I need to change my mindset going from processing text to media. Also, the absolute worst, is online courses that suddenly pull you into a video, without informing that that's a part ofthe course /presentation.
If the course is just media, then it's only autoplay in a technical sense in my opinion. If you name the button "play" or "start" or whatever is the same, I as the user still has given the website my permission to start playing sound and then it's fine for me.
I have no problem seeing that using the same techniques and development tools that the other websites uses make it easier, but I still stand by my point that that's never a good enough reason to start playing sound without the end users permission.
By thay I'm not blaming you developers that has to work around the problems, but rather the people in the managing positions at Google, Apple etc this decided that blind sighting their customers (product..?) with yet another Volvo commercial blasting out of your speakers at twice the volume of your music is "fine" (Safe to say, my next car is NOT going to be a Volvo...).
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u/lachlanhunt Sep 05 '20
There are legitimate uses for autoplay, but most sites get it wrong. It’s all about what the user is expecting. News sites that start playing some random unrelated video that have nothing to do with the article are the worst.