Optimizing the Silverlight Install Experience

Adam Kinney wrote a good blog entry last week on the importance for site authors of considering the first-time experience of a visitor. I guess most readers of this blog have Silverlight installed today, but at least in these first months as we focus on getting the plug-in broadly deployed, it's particularly important that site authors take care to test the experience of a visitor who doesn't already have Silverlight on their machine. The Silverlight installation process itself is fairly straightforward: we've done everything possible to minimize the number of clicks between site visit and first-time control instantiation, but our own work with early adopter sites has shown there are best practices that can greatly improve the user experience.

To that end, here are a few helpful tips:

• Use the inplaceInstallPrompt:true parameter in CreateSilverlight.js to present the Silverlight installer directly from the current home page rather than redirecting the end-user to the Silverlight site for the installer.
• Use the <div> tag into which Silverlight content is presented to create pre-install content (e.g. a static image that provides a glimpse of the final site experience when the user installs Silverlight) and present the Silverlight installer button as an overlay over that image;
• Use the Silverlight.ua.Browser property to provide guidance to the user (for example, warning them that they may not be able to install Silverlight if they are using Netscape 4.0 as their browser).
• Use a timeout delegate to see if the installation is complete, and, if so, refresh the browser automatically so the end-user doesn't have to manually hit F5 to reload the content.

To make this even easier, we've created a small download package that provides further guidance around installation in the form of a whitepaper and sample code. This MSI package doesn't make any changes to your machine except to extract the documentation and whitepaper to your documents folder. In our experience, it's well worth the hour or so it takes to implement these changes to your site to get the most out of Silverlight: it makes your site look more professional and reduces user confusion.

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 29, 2007
  Tim Sneath just posted some tips for optimizing the Silverlight install experience for your site's end

• Anonymous
  October 29, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 29, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 29, 2007
  Thanks Tim!  I know in a post a few days back you referenced having this type of flexibiilty in the install experience.  I'm glad to see you follow it up with some technical direction on how to get this done. We've recently looked at doing this a few different ways for some content on blendables.com and I'm happy to see a guide to help choose the right approach. Thanks, Kurt

• Anonymous
  October 29, 2007
  One of the things that is important to think about when you start using Silverlight in your sites/applications

• Anonymous
  October 29, 2007
  Thanks for the download. Any reason this has to be a full blown MSI and not just a ZIP file?! I hate my "Add or Remove Programs" list getting filled up with MSDN docs which are clearly NOT programs :(

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2007
  Tim Sneath has put together a post and his team a whitepaper with information on how to do an in-place

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2007
  Cioè come migliorare l'esperienza dell'utente che arriva sul nostro sito e che non ha ancora scaricato

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2007
  Silverlight is still in its infancy, but its user experience needs to be top notch for it to gain traction

• Anonymous
  October 31, 2007
  Silverlight Installation Experience Guide

• Anonymous
  November 01, 2007
  Over the past 3 weeks, I have been touring across Canada giving a half-day briefing on Silverlight. It

• Anonymous
  November 01, 2007
  Over the past 3 weeks, I have been touring across Canada giving a half-day briefing on Silverlight. It

• Anonymous
  November 02, 2007
  Adam Kinney and Tim Sneath both discuss those users that have yet to install SL; Tim Stall has a nice

• Anonymous
  November 03, 2007
  It would also be useful to be able to count the number of users who come to your site without Silverlight and those who then install it in response to the prompts, or leave the site still without Silverlight. Any ideas how this could be coded?

• Anonymous
  November 06, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 18, 2007
  随着 Silverlight 1.0 在今年9月5日的全球同步发布，在国内包括&quot;百度&quot;在内的越来越多的网站开始选择应用了 Silverlight 技术。下面就对 Silverlight

• Anonymous
  December 01, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 02, 2008
  Happy New Year everyone! Hope everyone had a relaxed and enjoyable holiday. The peacock family I met

• Anonymous
  April 15, 2008
  Silverlight is still in its infancy, but its user experience needs to be top notch for it to gain traction

• Anonymous
  June 28, 2008
  Tim Sneath has put together a post and his team a whitepaper with information on how to do an in-place install of Silverlight. Using the default approach (as we did on our early work) is ok, but it isn&#39;t a great user experience. In that setup, the