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Every pricing page should have GIFs

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Re: Every pricing page should have GIFs

#61

Post by tobyjsullivan »

matt-attack wrote: post #48
k1t wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes liberties are taken here, such as California originally separating carpool lanes with yellow lines (when they should have been white). Presumably they felt that even though yellow was incorrect, it sent a clearer "do not cross" message to drivers. They were later ordered to change them to white.

I noticed that change recently and assumed it was motivated by Tesla. There are certain things we all take for granted when driving. A huge one that we probably don’t give much conscious thought to us this: How do we know if the lane to the left is ok to go in, or if it actually is for carrying oncoming traffic? You’d like to think that one way though not the only way, is to look for a double yellow line. As in, doub…

You are giving way too much credit to autonomous vehicles in this theory. Line colours are standard throughout all of North America (that I’ve seen so far). Yellow means what it means. This carpool line experiment would have been confusing to any driver seeing it for the first time.

Imagine a tourist on that highway for the first time, at 3am, when there’s no traffic. Can they use that lane? Can they pull a sneaky u-turn and start driving the opposite direction?

What if I’m driving down the highway, effectively on mental autopilot, and suddenly become aware that I’m on the “wrong” side of the yellow line? How would I be likely to react?

The opportunities for misunderstanding by normal humans seem plenty.

Re: Every pricing page should have GIFs

#62

Post by chrismorgan »

janekm wrote: post #23
lol768 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's more of an implementation detail. But indeed, if I implemented this myself I wouldn't use GIFs. It's a joke of a format which produces bloated files, very limited colours (slightly less limited if you employ some creative hacks), no proper alpha support. We should put it in the bin and move on. Whether that's elements with no controls using something like AV1 (neat but no alpha AFAIK), APNG or VP9, I don't…

For a screen recording of a UI, it's the perfect format unless you're demoing a video/photo editing application. You don't need alpha or many colours and screen recordings are quite efficient in a GIF.

This is just not true.

Re: Every pricing page should have GIFs

#63

Post by chrismorgan »

janekm wrote: post #24
BasilPH wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, video codecs are way better at generating smaller file sizes. GIFs are literally like flip-books of images. You can also autoplay videos without controls and loop them, but you have to mute them. Most "GIF" hosting websites actually use videos. Especially when it's "GIFs with sound".

That's actually not correct, GIFs can encode the differences between frames and quite efficiently for screen recordings. A GIF will be more efficient for a screen recording so long as there are small changes between frames.

Real video codecs do temporal compression too, and considerably better than GIF.

The situations where GIF can be smaller or more efficient than real video codecs are generally esoteric, to the point where I’m happy to say that no one should ever use GIFs for block-level graphics.

Re: Every pricing page should have GIFs

#64

Post by ldng »

And what about the visually impaired ? You add a soundtrack ? So basically a video. Of course the a transcript is available, right ?

So instead of going full circle, how about a good old text in the first place ?

Re: Every pricing page should have GIFs

#65

Post by janekm »

technobabbler wrote: post #43
janekm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for screen recordings, unless you're doing a screen recording of photos or videos a GIF will typically be more bandwidth efficient (as there will be large areas of single colours and few changes between frames which GIF is good at).

> as there will be large areas of single colours and few changes between frames which GIF is good at Pretty sure that's how modern video codecs work too. A lot of movies have regions that don't change much between frames (e.g. backgrounds, or some dude's face staring at the camera all dramatically). What GIF gets you is a lossless video, which is overkill for most applications. Video codecs can achieve a similar perc…

Yes indeed all modern video codecs are based on encoding differences between key frames. GIF has the most basic implementation of that (it can update only a window in the image instead of the whole image).

The original GIF can actually be compressed losslessly down to just 1.4MB with a better compressor like https://gifcompressor.com .

MP4 (and similar codecs) are not typically very good at compressing regions of constant colour, while GIF is very good at that. However I have to admit that the output of that converter is acceptable in MP4, better than I would have expected (though noticeably worse quality).

BTW curiously (likely to better performance on regions of constant colour) the non-lossy WebP does better on this example coming in at just 1.2MB!

Re: Every pricing page should have GIFs

#67

Post by avinashjn »

adrianh wrote: post #44
franciscop wrote: post #15

Don't use GIFs, use audioless mp4s instead. They can be made to work in the exact same way as GIFs (autoplay, loop or not, etc) but are a fraction of the bandwidth.

This is exactly what we do on https://www.soundslice.com/features/ (the minivideos below the main hero section). Would definitely recommend using MP4s instead of GIFs, for the bandwidth savings.

Second the mp4 part. We started with gifs on bugasura.io and ended up with a pageinsights at 20!

Apparently these gifs are loaded along with the other assets and lazy loading them is not simple.

We moved to mp4 and the scores have increased quite a bit.

Re: Every pricing page should have GIFs

#68

Post by Ragnarork »

I know this is a probably overtly provocative title, but still...

This makes the assumption:

- That everyone navigate a SaaS website in a particular way

- That no-one uses text-to-speech accessibility software when navigating websites

- That everyone wants a picture/gif to know more about a feature

Basically, a quite inconsiderate approach to UX design.

Re: Every pricing page should have GIFs

#69

Post by janekm »

BasilPH wrote: post #55
janekm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually not correct, GIFs can encode the differences between frames and quite efficiently for screen recordings. A GIF will be more efficient for a screen recording so long as there are small changes between frames.

Oh, interesting. So it does some encoding, but not very efficiently?

Yes, in the GIF format you can update just a window inside the image rather than the whole image for each frame. There are also control blocks that specify that a particular colour value is to be treated as transparent (within the logical image) and that the background image should be restored after the window is drawn.

So for example a moving pointer can be very efficient if the encoder is able to take advantage of all these features.

A better encoder can take the images from the article down by a lot (I got 80% reduction with minimal reduction in quality using https://compress-or-die.com).

Re: Every pricing page should have GIFs

#70

Post by msdrigg »

ldng wrote: post #64

And what about the visually impaired ? You add a soundtrack ? So basically a video. Of course the a transcript is available, right ? So instead of going full circle, how about a good old text in the first place ?

Exactly. And similarly with the charts and graphs, how about just the good old raw csv data
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