Communicating with Interactive Articles
distill.pub
distill.pub
When I was an academic, I had the privilege of participating in the process of producing one article for Distill, and the amount of work was equivalent to 3-5x the work of any one single publication in other venues. I’m not sure that’s avoidable to achieve the quality that Distill strives for, but it means the incentives are all pointed against it.
A direct consequence of working on an environment with bad incentives is that people there will burn out, which is part of what I think happened.
I have wondered if there are opportunities for standardizing some types of visualizations so they can be used more broadly.
> The New York Times provided one of the few available data points, stating that only a fraction of readers interact with non-static content, and suggested that designers should move away from interactivity
Then their citation [1] mentions: "Why? ... Users just want to scroll"
It seems like this is the approach a lot of interactive articles use these days, where most of the "interactive" content is still shown by default as the user scrolls.
[1] https://github.com/archietse/malofiej-2016/blob/master/tse-m...
I’ve interacted with sites where scrolling locked in to pages, and I thought that was fine (As I say this, that sounds like “swiping” - which I think is fine and feels intuitive).
Also similar to how iterators are a fantastic API in most cases: lots of things can be built on top of getting the next item.
It's just such an excellent example of the potential of interactive articles. And, it did manage to go modestly viral.
She calls them explorable explanations. If someone is going to go to the relatively great effort of making interactive articles, she has linked some articles on the creative process for interactive formats that can really help play to the strengths of the format (or maybe better put as lack of format).
Normally I might refrain from pointing this out but it's so ironically on point.
I appreciate what that site is trying to do, but in thinking about this sort of amusing irony it occurred to me that one of the advantages of something extremely simple and static — the closer to the printed page the better the example — the more foolproof it is. Interactivity opens up great possibilities for communication but also opportunities for errors and other forms of failure.
I'm not meaning this as a criticism, more as something to be mindful of in choosing a medium.
It seems difficult to build the same interactivity for both mobile and desktop. Making it even more difficult to design and implement such interactive publications.