Al Jazeera open-sources InterviewJS, turns interviews into interactive chats | Hacker News Reader

Al Jazeera open-sources InterviewJS, turns interviews into interactive chats

journalism.co.uk

148 pointsmark-ruwt24 comments

Demo: https://story.interviewjs.io/sample-story

Github: https://github.com/AJInteractive/InterviewJS

I tried it out, and I was unimpressed. It's a cool experiment and maybe there are useful applications, but this doesn't feel like the future of journalism to me.

The demo page remains completely empty for me (latest Chrome, ad-blocker turned off).

I looked at one interview on the main page, and I'm not convinced either. Just show me the whole interview all at once on a page. Why do I have to click and click and click? Usability is significantly worse compared to having it all on a normal page.

Demo doesn't work for me (Firefox, latest version)

Also using Firefox 60, demo is a blank page.

Same, looks like their demo does not work.

Demo works if you follow the links from the home page.

The demos from the main page works for me. Really cool.

In description they mention that it also allow to rearrange bobble.

Did you find it or it is still in TODO list.

Holy crap, that's annoying.

No want.

Try: https://story.interviewjs.io/hd3g6tYmzLgfYYUqzaEzFm/

Agreed, it's really obnoxious. This seems like a project that should've died in the idea stage.

This seems exceptionally silly to me. When giving an interview, the person being interviewed expects to have their interview presented in the order the questions are asked. There's a bunch of context you lose when ignoring the order. This interface basically amplifies all the problems inherent in 'soundbites' and makes it 1000x worse.

Valid points, but it doesn’t appear like you’re forced to allow scripts out of sequence. I was using the Obamacare one and everything flowed okay.

Not something I’d leverage per se, but not bad.

I think this is an extremely interesting interface. Not only for journalist interviews but for personal brand sites.

Take a look at Adrian Zumbrunnen's personal site: https://azumbrunnen.me/

(Unfortunately their SSL cert has expired so you have to click "Proceed Anyway")

It's an embedded chat with Adrian.

I feel like it's an equally valid experience vs. reading their CV and recent projects. By clicking through the chat I not only learn about the site author's expertise but also learn a bit about their personality.

I know I'm not really chatting with them but it still feels more personal and human.

I think Adrian’s site is a better example of how to execute this. The example interviews offer pretty minimal interaction, it’s not conversational, and random SoundCloud links are dumped in.

I’d much rather read an interview, because I want to see the whole picture, whereas a personal site I may only want to see the directly interesting things.

Another interesting example I forgot to reference is Typeform's interactive blog post.

https://www.typeform.com/blog/human-experience/cui/

The bot experience gives it kind of a rap genius commentary from the original author. So it almost feels like you're reading the post with the author present next to you.

It’s funny—I love this format for Quartz but don’t like it much here. I think a small portion of it is some missing animation but the bigger piece in the chosen content. IMO, it works for Quartz because the format is headline followed by selecting between more info and next story. The “more info” flow usually results in 2-4 additional messages about the story, perhaps with one additional interaction. Quick and easy. A full interview feels like too much for this format.

Recommend you check out the Quartz app if you think the format could be interesting.

Well, it's an interesting concept I'll give them that. It does what it says it does, and provides a slightly more interactive layout for an interview.

But at the same time, it's just really not worth using to be honest with you. I mean, how exactly does this benefit the reader or make the interview more enjoyable to read?

It doesn't. It breaks without JavaScript, it takes forever for you to read the whole interview and it breaks tons of simple browser functionality aspects like being able to search the page or jump to a specific question easily. It's like the people who created it made it not because it improved the user experience, but because they wanted to be different for the sake of being different.

Yeah, I think I'll stick to the traditional text interview format with all the questions and answers on one page thank you very much. At least those (like the ones on my own site) don't break the browser and let users get to the bloody point.

No. Just no.

The BBC has just started doing this / something similar with their royal wedding coverage* and I found it incredibly irritating. No longer can you scan an article, but instead have to traverse a choose-your-own-adventure style chatbot to get the information you’re used to simply scanning the article for. I probably also especially despised it because the journalism on these new segments seems to be overly poppy/gossipy (an attempt to fit to the chat format, I guess).

Perhaps I’m in a minority of users here, as a developer who can see past the UI gimmick. Emulating one of the most pervasive UI/UX paradigms (mobile chat) could prove useful and refreshing to the majority of readers. I’m just not sold yet.

I feel a more solid approach — if publishers really want to make their written content more interactive — would be to organise the information from an interview / article into topics that can be dived-into via a visual hierarchy of information.

*Can’t load a reference on mobile browser.

The BBC's experiment, from what I can tell, has left the format of the core story untouched. All the chatbot' does is tinker with the format of what would traditonally be 'box-outs' in print journalism or possiboly 'related story' content.

As an ex-journalist, if feels like a valuable way of letting a journalist use the additional research information that has been gathered, but doesn't easily fit into the structure of the story and which would previously have been left in the journalist's note book.

Could be a pretty useful tool for creating a text-based game with multiple plot lines :)

It looks like an existing interview transformed into a non-live interactive chat where you are given preselected questions to choose from.

I didn't understand that from their write up. Am I missing something?

It’s a great react/aws project - composer ui, react code, content format (for fun chat bot like scripts).

Trying to read while the page is animating is really distracting. I would close it without reading.

Twitch plays interviews?

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