August 05, 2007
A nice idea, but not working
BoingBoing has a link to NewsInitiative, which though it does have some truly fascinating projects, is, in my opinion, a poor use of the web as a medium.
By way of intro, NewsInitiative is apparently a student journalism project co-sponsored by Berkeley, Northwestern, Columbia and USC. It's quite impressive for student work, as far as I've been able to tell. But that "as far as" turns out to be rather limited, because a good chunk of the information presented there is in video form, and I find myself instinctively refusing to watch videos to get information as the medium is inherently low-bandwidth. I can read several times faster than any person can talk, and if I'm surfing the web, I'm looking for information, not conversation. Unless--like YouTube--the medium is inseparably related to the message being communicated, putting in video form what can just as easily be communicated via text is going to lose a huge chunk of potential audience right off the bat.
Additionally, the site uses way too much Flash for things which totally don't need Flash. There isn't a single thing on the site that I saw on there that couldn't have been conveyed just as well with a static image. Sure, the sliding topic windows are kinda cool, but they're ultimately just annoying, and they slow down my progress through the site.
Say what you like about the content of Drudge, it makes excellent use of the web as a news medium. By displaying only headlines in only text format, I can finish a complete scan of the page in little more than a glance, without using any input tools other than the occasional pageup/down, and only if it's a big news day. If I want to read an article, I can click, or if I'm not in a mouse kind of mood, use Firefox's quicksearch to jump directly to a link. If the site were in Flash, this would be impossible.
Maybe I'm just being a tech snob here, but I really think that sites designed as inefficiently as NewsInitiative is will fail to reach their potential if they insist upon gimmicky Flash interfaces which don't add anything to the experience. Even if most users won't be able to tell you why or how, they're still going to find the site annoying.
I agree w/you. The site is useless to me as long as my computer is unable to play web video with sound. Not to mention it is inaccessible to people with disabilities - blind people would have trouble with the Flash, and deaf people with the audio. Why limit your audience? Make a text based site, and everyone can use it.
Posted by: Evan Donovan at August 5, 2007 11:08 AMyou can do the sliding topic windows (or something damn close) without flash, so ya, crappy interface
Posted by: Josiah at August 5, 2007 01:58 PM