The negative effects of animated GIFs in MuseScore's Handbook

The presence of animated GIFs in MuseScore's documentation has increased dramatically in recent months. Indeed some of the GIFS are quite useful, but the abundance of animated GIFs on certain pages has reached the point of distraction.

Pros of animated GIFs:

     • A picture is worth 1000 words

     • GIFs have a lighter storage footprint than videos

Cons of animated GIFs

     • thee or four GIFs playing per page = annoying distraction

     • even just one or two hyperactive GIFs = serious distraction

     • GIFs loop endlessly by default — I don’t know if GIFs have an autoplay property. If so, distraction could be greatly reduced with autoplay = OFF. Alternately perhaps there’s an option to play-once, stop the GIF, and display a Play button.

     • in the MuseScore 4 Handbook we can’t pause or rewind GIFs, so there’s no easy way to halt playback at particular point to examine a notational example, a menu, palette, dialog ... it all just wizzes by.

     • There is no progress bar so it's impossible to know if you're at the beginning middle or end. And sometimes when a GIF loops it's hard to know if it's continuing with a depiction of a new and similar topic … or if it’s started over.

Recommendations

     • have GIFs appear like most video. Paused at the start with a play button, as shown in the attached GIF.

     • have GIFs play once and stop … with the option to restart

     • if the previous suggestions are not possible, then require that those submitting GIFs signify end of “recording” with a fade to black … or add one or two seconds of black screen at the end. Anything to prevent users from watching the loop three or four times before they realize.

I’ll go out on a limb here with a couple of probably points:

1) Whether correct or not, let's make the assumptions that musicians are generally sensitive people, and that sensitive people are easily distracted.

2) Animated GIFs are distracting—otherwise advertisers wouldn't rely on them so heavily. And I think everyone knows this is true.

The more MuseScore documentation includes autoplay animated GIFs the more difficult it will be to remain focused when reading the documentation.

3) as an experiment:
      • open a second browser page of this post
      • start the animated GIF.
      • position the playing GIF as close as you can to the first browser page
      • try rereading this article in the first browser page