This particular animation in a video format would take 10 seconds of running time. It would also take few seconds to load and initialize whatever video playing widget it'd be using. That would make it for an oddly short video and one of those "What? That's it?" situations. So it simply wouldn't work as the only content on the page. OTOH, if you present it as an interactive animation, it will take users longer to work their way through it and so it would feel more substantial.

Secondary reason is that it makes the page more memorable and helps it stick in more people's heads than some yet another embedded video. The goal of the page is to engage people. This is the reason why you'd want to have things presented rather than just thrown on a page in black and white Times New Roman / 12px. You want your page to engage and clicking on Play Video is not engagement, it's a reflex. So by forcing visitors to do something out of their routine the page, effectively, makes them to pay more attention than usual.

Not everything that's memorable is good. I was happy to see the "play" button alternative to the scrolling interaction. I used the play button, enjoyed the video and believe I will remember it without experiencing the annoyance of having to manually play it using the scroll bar.

Try speaking it clearly and slowly as a voiceover artist would as you go through the slides. 'Meet Bob. Bob is a fisherman. He runs his own store and has an online store [boom, there's your 10 secs]'.

Memorable isn't good if they don't get to the sales ptch, which most people wouldn't.

Personally I completely agree with modernerd, this would have been a waste of time and money if it wasn't novel enough to get featured on HN or /r/programming or stuff for a few extra sales. For its stated purpose, it's useless.

Not saying I'm right and you are wrong, just that people have different irritants, as it were.

A lot of people will need something thats this simple to digest on their own speed, though. I will be sending this link out to a few past and potential future SMB clients.

The amount of people like "Bob" who are running their own website is astounding. They need simple things like this that help introduce them to the idea of A/B testing.

- It's user-friendly.

- Compatible with everything.

- I can read as much or as little as I want.

- If I want to re-read something, I know exactly how to do that and it doesn't involve clicking a play head trying to find the place it was in.

I feel like people keep trying to bring back reincarnations of flash interactivity and since it uses html5 and other buzzwords, it's ok. Well, it's not.

Every time someone "fixes" the experience of what should just be reading online, they make it much more cumbersome and annoying. One day everyone will look back at what people did with html5 and laugh the way we all look back and laugh at flash intros and playing music on load.

It also makes skipping or rewinding a matter of finely-navigated clicks into tiny target areas, whereas the best hardware scrolling controls offer giant, forgiving action-areas yet that still enable nearly pixel-level resolution and fine steps of speed/acceleration.

Depending on your device, scrolling in many directions might be very, very easy. Large trackpads, the Apple 'Magic Mouse', and most touch screens can make scrolling far more easy, adaptive, and intuitive than even 'forward' and 'back' buttons.

I tend to think people most peeved by scrolling as a major navigational technique (in both space and time) are still using tiny trackpads, mice with nubby scroll wheels, or even (shudder) ThinkPad-like joysticks or keyboard arrows. Stone knives and bearskins!

Does this apply to you?

They go too slow, they're usually painfully cheesy, and I hate that I have to listen to them. I read much faster than the narrator talks.

A video for this demo probably would have lasted 1:30 or so. I was able to scroll through in about fifteen seconds, didn't have to find headphones to do so, and got all of the same information.

That's a good point. There is a general expectation that playing a video also means playing audio, and some environments – like offices – aren't great for that.

> ...user can control the speed of information. ... Video has no way for that.

I frequently skim through video by dragging the head in the progress bar, or skip three or four minutes ahead in longer videos. With scrollmation, the default scroll speed is normally much slower than the equivalent video speed of 30fps, it results in jerky movement, and the speed of the video is directly proportional to how hard I am prepared to work to make it go faster. Good UX designers don't make users do shit work.

I can only speak for myself, but I rarely, if ever, watch website videos, especially at work.

I made it through this entire thing by scrolling.

While I understand video is sometimes the best way to convey an idea, I fricken hate it. It would need to be something very, very intriguing for me to watch. 99% of websites selling things don't fall into that category.

Personally, I liked the animation.

I've seen great results from the signup forms that http://wistia.com allows you to embed anywhere in a video. I'm not affiliated, but am impressed with the product; check out their "Call to action" and "Turnstile email capture" features in the embed builder on this page: http://wistia.com/product/superembeds

I agree. There is no way she would know to scroll properly in this interface and in most cases would get confused and give up. The objective of the presentation is to make it easy for someone (like my mom) to understand A/B testing. Make it a video, or at least provide a link to a video version.

EDIT: This akin to Amazon's usability - http://www.nngroup.com/articles/amazon-no-e-commerce-role-mo... i.e. once some behavior is establish on your site, keep it that way, but doesn't mean you need to emulate it.

Control for the users.