Video has become such an important medium online, yet video interface design is given surprisingly little attention. We have special devices and software for presenting text and images, but it seems we think of videos as being something we embed on a page, but can’t alter in any way to make it more usable.

When a video is short—2 to 3 minutes—it probably makes sense to just watch it from beginning to end. But what if the video is 20 minutes long, or an hour, for example, a conference talk or an online course?

In the last few years new tools allow people to browse, scan, and skim the contents of a video. A video digest is a way to partition a long video into chapters and sections within a chapter. For each segment and chapter, you can read a short summary about that part of the video, and see a thumbnail. It means that, as a user, you can skim through a video and even click on the thumbnail and watch that part of the video. All of this is created post-production, meaning that existing videos can be turned into digests.

Users appreciate the ability to scan and skim videos similarly to how they would scan and skim text or images.

Takeaways

When you provide a video that’s longer than 5 minutes, offer a video digest to make the video more usable.Use thumbnails and summaries to help people digest the video content quickly.