The user is the director

Journey to the End of Coal is a new web-only documentary following two journalists speaking with workers in China’s coal industry which merges classic journalistic interviews with navigation and interaction approaches more commonly associated with first-person gaming.

As users watch the presentation it will frequently stop to offer them a range of options of how to continue. Stay here and speak with this person? Go somewhere else? The user is actively deciding on the path of the narrative, choosing locations to investigate, the people to speak with and which questions to ask.

It’s technically impressive as a project, using full-screen flash to present streaming video and still photography as an immersive environment.

Map showing locations, with current location (far left) marked in red.

Forcing the users to make decisions is at times more emotive, as you can choose the angle that’s pursued (within the limits of the questions recorded in the interviews). You feel like you’re interacting with the subjects, but that connection comes at a cost – it’s equally frustrating having to keep prompting people to reveal more rather than passively sitting back and watching a video or reading a story.

There’s also the nagging feeling that if you don’t ask every question presented you might miss the crucial answer or angle that drives home the documentary’s point. Making the user play the role of journalist and search for the answers by asking the right questions also makes it easy for them to miss them entirely.

Many ways to navigate

ABC Australia’s Gallipoli: The First Day documentary takes a series of video and audio sequences that would otherwise be viewed in a linear or menu-driven sequence, and has arranged them on a 3D map to put the documentary sequences in context of the locations they relate to.

Google Earth 3D map chapter view of the ABC's Gallipoli: The First Day multimedia

The map in this case is based on Google Earth’s technology, so they’ve also released a ‘layer’ file for the downloadable Google Earth desktop application, allowing users to view the documentary content from within the standard map application – and interesting extension to the idea that makes their content available outside the confines of the ABC’s website.

That in itself marks maybe the biggest shift in approach of the three.

As the reach of broadcast media shifts and users grow more accepting of mashups, you’ll reach more users with relevant information that’s available in digestible pieces wherever the user is, even if that’s outside the walls of your own website.

As well as the need to find out what’s happening in the world, one other role of newspapers we see in user research on news consumption is the concept of reading a newspaper being a lifestyle decision, a weekend habit that’s a way for people to relax. In this browsing approach readers tend to dip in and and out of articles, digesting background information and opinion and aiming to feel connected to the larger world.

Media companies around the world have aggressively chased (and relatively successfully met) the first need by emphasising breaking news online and through 24/7 publishing schedules, chasing radio and TV as the first place people turn for coverage of news as it happens.

But how is the New York Times, probably the most famous newspaper in the world, meeting this relaxed browsing style?

Skimming

The New York Times have been actively testing solutions to this meet this casual browsing mode. Their Article Skimmer prototype aims to “provide an online approximation of the pleasure of reading the Sunday Times” print edition, encouraging users to skim through summaries, dipping in to read stories without leaving the page and then easily clicking back to the skimmer’s index to move on to the next story.

Section of the New York Times skimmer prototype

It’s a slick concept and I’ve often found myself using the skimmer rather than the cluttered nytimes.com homepage as it gives a narrower slice of content and an easier way to dive into sections of content without loading new pages.

That this alternate homepage is completely devoid of advertising also plays a part in its appeal.

The most recent update added a range of features and shortcuts, making it easier to navigate with the keyboard and adding mouse gestures to allow users to ‘throw’ the page up and down &emdash; a gesture all too familiar to those used to Apple’s iPhone interface &emdash; and also includes a choice of layout and colour schemes.

Yet despite the code wizardry behind the skimmer it’s still hobbled by the limitations of the web browser, particularly when it comes to the real hallmark of printed editorial design: typography.

Text wraps strangely and doesn’t fit in the layout, headlines are a fraction too bold, and on sections without images the page gets very dense with text. At heart it lacks the sense of human-edited construction and polish that’s clearly evident in the printed pages of the New York Times for the simple reason that the skimmer is entirely automated.

Bringing back the look of print

The new version 2.0 update to the Times Reader, a downloadable application allowing print subscribers to view content from the New York Times’ daily print edition, side-steps these problems by not using a web browser at all.

Built using Adobe’s AIR application platform and in collaboration with Adobe’s internal team, Times Reader takes giant leaps towards replicating the print experience for readers. From the familiar typeface to the column layouts, this really is the stuff that makes print people excited.

From the user’s perspective, the sections presented on the left are like liftouts of the paper. Stories aren’t repeated across multiple sections, the same as print. Unlike the website, stories on the “Front Page” section are the same stories as the print edition, fixed in time until the next day’s edition is published. Fresh content is piped into a “Latest News” panel across the top of the page, and has its own dedicated index in the navigation on the left.

There’s a clear heirarchy of stories across the page and strong use of imagery (though both change as you resize the window) and there’s an option to ‘zoom out’ and scan across multiple pages at once, replicating the skimming behaviour of flicking through pages of a print newspaper, and diving in to read articles of interest.

Times Reader 'Browse' mode

For those who want to print stories, the Times Reader also presents well-formatted page that’s almost better than newsprint, laying out the story in two columns (interestingly, much wider than those in the paper’s grid) and neatly presenting pullquotes and images.

Times Reader print layout

Importantly for the bean-counters at the Times it also rolls in standard advertising units and the ubiquitious Google text ads, making sure they can claw back some of the precious advertising income that comes from their website, though their web article pages contain more ad opportunities than Times Reader’s page layouts.

And there’s the dilemma.

Any new online format has to balance the needs of users with the demands of the advertisers who effectively underwrite the site, and right now most major media experiments lean towards one or the other.

Nicholas Rapp has written a post over at his personal blog discussing the creation of a graphic on American vehicle carbon dioxide emissions. The creation of this graphic demonstrates how data can be interpreted in different ways depending on the method that it is displayed.

The first map showing emissions come from major cities

In his post you can see a map of the USA with two versions of the same data overlay; the first has the total emissions per county per year, the second has total emissions per capita per year. The interesting thing is the two stories that the data tell; naturally the first says that all the emissions come from the major cities. But when you look at the second map, there as a noticeable difference in the indicators.

The second map tells a different story

Cities like Los Angeles have a large emission marker on the first version (per county) but a basically non-existent in the second version (per capita). Where as places in the middle of the country have a much larger indicator in the second version. I’m not going to go into what the data is implying (like less people in the country and further to travel etc) but it does demonstrate that from the same data two different stories can be told.

I think it is important to know what story you want to tell when designing a visualisation around data, though sometimes it may not hurt to test the data against some different filters/categories to see if there is something else that maybe more interesting.

Update

Carbon emissions from road transport

Since this post is about vechile carbon emissions, you might like to have a look at a data set The Guardian has released on carbon emmissions from vechiles around the world. From this data they have also produced a really nice clean graphic with the 10 largest polluting countries.

We have been working on creating a new service that make lots of data instantly available for intuitive, visual exploration. Today’s launch is a first step in that direction.

Starting with data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division, Google are using Flash to allow users to chart and analyse unemployment or population statistics. While you’re able to create links to your view of the data, for the moment it’s not possible to embed them in other web pages.

It’s clear that Google have plans to add plenty more datasets to the service which, given it comes from the engine behind the famous Gapminder system, could have a big impact on how easily we can interpret data.

Currently the story of the H1N1 Swine Flu is being approached in two ways on a map:

1. How far the virus has spread and how many people it has effected.
2. How far the virus has spread and how fast it traveled that distance.

A simple map using Google

The Google map is a good example of coverage though it can be hard to read how many people effected by the virus as you need to click on each point to read the information, though it doesn’t give you any sense of how fast it has spread.

The Wall Street Journal's interactive map

The Wall Street Journal has an interactive flash map which is easier to use, with more visual feedback on the spread and number of people effected.

The Guardian's map shows the spread of cases day by day

For portraying the sense of speed that the virus has traveled, The Guardian map I believe to be one of the best. Not only does it show markers for the types of swine flu cases (suspected and confirmed outbreaks), it also has a click-able time line that updates the map with the spread of the virus day by day. This is very effective at telling the story of a global emergency, by clicking each date you see the dots on the map grow, visually reinforcing the speed and spread much better than text ever could. But it is hard to gauge the number of people effected, except for reading a single overall paragraph each day.

The New York Times swine flu map

A half way point between telling these two stories on a map is over at the New York Times. Their flash map, similar to the Wall Street Journal map is accompanied by a day by day excerpt in the right hand column. This doesn’t really give the sense of speed that the virus has spread compared to the Guardian version, though you can read about the unfolding event while obtaining good information on the number of people effected from the map.

Overall, I don’t think we have seen the last versions of these maps from the news site. I am sure that before the end of (or very soon after) this global event there will be an interactive map, probably with a multimedia component, produced that will tell the story of speed, spread and effect that the H1N1 Swine Flu had on the world.

Opening photo by Wade From Oklahoma

Meanwhile, the audience for newspaper Web sites continues to grow. In the first quarter of 2009, newspaper Web sites attracted more than 73 million unique visitors each month, on average, according to an analysis by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America. That is a 10.5 percent increase from the first quarter of 2008.