Should I offer a button to start animations on comment sections or autoplay them?

Question

My website has a comment section in which people can post images. Many people post animations (which are actually MP4 converted from GIF's, so they are quick to load and save a lot of bandwidth), and until now I've had a play button available if the user wants to play the animation.

However, recently I, and other users, have been getting a little annoyed at how inconvenient it is. A lot of times people post an animation on every comment, and clicking on the play button for each is annoying. Others, however, think I should keep it because sometimes they don't want to play the animations. Not to mention that it's memory-consuming.

What should I do? What I did for now was - auto-play the first images, then pause them and add a play button when the user presses "load more." But is it wise to load them all?

Thanks.

Answer 1

How about autoplay on hover, and click for continuous play? You could also implement a user setting that could be set in their preferences for whether animations should play automatically or not.

This would solve all your problems at once.

Answer 2

The best user experience is made of many elements, and one of the most important, is control, or feel of control.

If your users have control over a feature, in this case to play the animation or not, it shouldn't be removed unless there is a really god reason.

More specifically, animations on comments are usually something not relevant, and can get distracting, not to mention overload the browser and system, so leaving them inactive until the user wants to activate it, is the best option.

Since your question is related only to comments, that is the bes way. But for post, you can leave the animation active by default since we can assume that the person who wrote the text/post considers that animation to be important to convey the idea.

Answer 3

Why not indicate that the images have animation without having to click anything.

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

Outline persists regardless of playing state. Play button disappears when playing.

The advantage to the play button is the clarity in communicating animation, but it could be confused for a video (especially if users can also post videos in the forums). The outline would require users to learn (which is never good), but could be demonstrated with a tooltip (?) box or something similar.

A site like Memegen.com does a decent job indicating animation without having images constantly playing.

Answer 4

The choice to convert an uploaded gif to mp4 is purely a back-end architectural decision. However, by not autoplaying it, that decision has bled into the user experience. If I upload a gif, I expect the browser to "autoplay" it, because that's the default behavior. I don't have to click play on any other website.

The conversion, while important for bandwidth savings should be transparent to your users.

Answer 5

@insaner has got pretty much the correct answer imo.

• Indicate on the picture that it is an animation .
• Make the animation play when hovered upon

This makes sure that the user does not have to perform an additional action. A good implementation of this can be viewed on the site cartilagefreecaptain.com

edit: looks like the site has changed that implementation. so here is a basic mockup of what i meant

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}