Playing music on a video upon alternative button press?

Design help General
1

Hi. I would like to get a general consensus from all you talented and experienced individuals out there. I’m looking to insert a showreel at the top of my agency’s website. Ideally I’m looking to design a sequence where the user presses ‘Enter Studio’, the screen draws back to unveil a laptop. Using WF interactions it will then zoom into the laptop to play the showreel/vimeo video(with sound), then zoom back out, ready for the user to scroll the website.

Q. My question is this. In this particular sequence, would you all feel this is frowned upon if playing music from the video, upon an alternative(and unexpected) button press? There are so many mixed opinions on this. JB does it superbly on one of his amazing sites with no permission asked. But, it’s done tastefully. Do you all see this as a big fat NO for designing? Or, if done right, do you think it can change the whole dynamic of a site?

My initial thoughts are, this is a great way to set the tone for a unique user experience. However, there is a side of me that thinks this may be intrusive, and annoy people who were not expecting the music to be played. Thoughts?

My only other alternative would be to play a background video with no sound (sitting inside the laptop screen) then have something like a clickable showreel option at the bottom of the hero to play the 1080 or 4k version through vimeo. Not quite as unique but a safer option.

Thanks in advance folks. Apologies for the lengthy message. Just so you have all the elements to the equation. :slight_smile:
Gareth.

Here is my site Read-Only: [LINK]1
([[how to share your site Read-Only link](https://zagg-creative-design-stud-e3a533fd68377.webflow.io/)]2)

2

I would offer the user two choices, show reel, show reel with music. Use custom code to handle the result.

3

Hi Jeff. Not sure I follow? So I was intially wanting display showreel when entering the website (through a zoom in/out laptop sequence). The second option is to display BG video on laptop with no sound, then showreel as an additional option?

What do you think about the whole playing music unexepectedly? Have you done it? JB’s site is more for entertainment. I would imagine my site is being looked at from an informational standpoint with being entertained/engaged as secondary. But then, I do like to break away from the norm. Rules if broken tastefully can offer something completely unique.

Thanks.

4

If you’ve ever looked at your surfing stats in detail, you’ll see generally two “prime time” traffic slots; one is right after lunch, the other is right after dinner.

At lunch, most people are back at their desk at work, taking a mental break. Un-asked-for sound on websites likely would not be appreciated.

At dinner, it’s probably less of an issue, but it still tends to annoy most people.

Jeff’s approach is the cleanest.

“Enter Studio” starts the sequence muted, you can have an additional unmute button.

“Enter Studio w/ Music” starts unmuted, you’ll still want a mute button.

A good UX always starts with giving the user basic control over the key aspects of the experience.