By Ashley Wells
Ninety-nine percent of the news “interactives” I’ve seen have nothing to do with storytelling. Most are simply reference material with navigation that amounts to a collection of categories or dots on a map. There are a million innovative ways to do these, but the idea is the same as a factbox in a newspaper–to provide context for the real story.
True interactive stories are rare. The most innovative ones I’ve seen don’t try to hard to be “innovative.” There’s a simplicity in the presentation, a subtlety in the navigation; it flows smoothly from beginning to end, engaging you occasionally, not constantly. That’s good storytelling, online or off.
And I’d like to think that’s not just my opinion. There’s a sociology to this. I watch how people use my projects–even when they don’t know it. I use a mix of complex behavioral tracking and good old fashioned feedback to measure my own success, per project and over time. The evidence so far indicates that linear presentations, driven by audio and motion, tend to hold our users’ attention much longer than presentations that don’t have a central story line or require a lot of navigation. That’s not exactly innovative. That’s television.
But much of the Web is about data. Your stocks. Your weather. Your headlines. Everything, anytime, all non-linear. At its core, a story is a more linear experience–at odds with the way people use computers. Think about it. You sit upright just inches from your monitor, mouse in hand, eager to click. Try watching TV that close to the screen, remote in hand, finger on the button.
So the first thing I try to do is push people back from their screens, make them forget the mouse is there at first. When I want them to use it, I’ll tell them why and show them where. Why take the focus away from your content, even for a second? I try to engage users in ways that will help them relate to the story–making the presentation more active, and ultimately more memorable, than a passive TV experience. The key is not to overdo it.
Interactive stories that incessantly nag the user to ‘click to continue’ become cumbersome. That can disengage the audience. So can poorly written audio scripts, voiced by an inexperienced narrator, processor-taxing effects or “dynamic,” though non-intuitive, navigation. Sometimes all you’re left with is a 500k killer app that ends up killing the story.
I used to think old-school print reporters or ex-TV producers were behind botched interactives. They didn’t understand the potential of this medium. Increasingly, I’m not so sure that’s the case. Maybe many of these presentations don’t appreciate the potential of good old-fashioned storytelling.
Ashley Wells is an interactive producer at MSNBC.com. He describes his job as getting people to “play with their news.” These comments were prepared for the “Painting the News” conference and workshop co-sponsored by NewsLab and the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, February 15-16, 2002.
