How publishers botch even their best digital journalism projects
SavedYouAClick: They don’t think about users
The Global Editors Network announced the winners of the 2014 Data Journalism awards last week, honoring the best in digital news projects and visualizations. And, in the spirit of the contest, I’m tempted to create a pie chart that shows the serious flaws in presentation and user experience you can find in many of the finalists.
I know that I could find similar problems on just about any news site, so I don’t mean to pick on the sites below. But, these are often among the most expensive, high profile and labor-intensive projects a newsroom will create in a year, and if they can’t get some of these basic things right, it sets a bad example for everyone else. (Plus, you know, they did nominate themselves.)
I’m not talking about some obvious problems, like a clear lack of labeling the source or creator of a graphic. Or more subjective matters of taste and design.
Instead, I’m talking about problems that betray a basic indifference to or misunderstanding of user behavior. Excluding (in the interest of fairness) my former employers, the Washington Post and the Center for Public Integrity, let’s take a look at some of the finalists.
Worst content integration
The Tampa Bay Times staff clearly put a lot of effort into their Charity Checker tool, a very worthwhile project. So why is there no mention of it in the related story, linked above? People come to stories, not to project pages. We’ve known this for a decade. You have to promote your best stuff in the article page.
This is fine work, but, well, why does it exist? It doesn't link to any story or package or offer me any context or newspeg as far as I can tell. It’s just odd how abandoned it is.
Fashion Week
The NYT’s Front Row to Fashion Week is a bonkers amazing page. I can’t even imagine the work that went into it. So it’s flabbergasting that none of the blog posts it links to (for instance: Proenza Schouler: Pleats and Prints) link back to it.
If I’m on the team that built Front Row, that has to be incredibly frustrating. (Hell, I’m frustrated and I don’t even work there.) How do you just miss opportunities to promote your best efforts and keep people on your site longer?
State Gun Laws Enacted in the Year Since Newtown | NYTimes.com
This page has 9,000 likes and 2,000 shares and is a complete dead end. It doesn't link to any related content. The Times made some news recently, in the wake of the big innovation report, for creating a tool to analyze the flow of traffic on the site. But do you really need a tool to know that your fantastic Newtown interactive should link to some of your other Newtown coverage?
Janet L. Yellen, on the Economy’s Twists and Turns
See above. I assume this was pegged to something, but I have no idea what.
In flight: see the planes in the sky right now | The Guardian
Once again, no related content or attempt to keep me on the site.
Thousands of syringes found on Scotland’s streets
Dear BBC, if you’re going to tell me to click on the interactive map, perhaps it shouldn't take me to what appears to be the designer’s personal site (How many discarded syringes have been found where you live?), disable the back button and offer me no links back to the story.
Most would-be ‘Snowfall’
You only fly once — A portrait on Swiss Snowboarder Iouri Podladtchikov
I absolutely admire the design and effort that went into this package, which merges text, video, interactive graphics, photo and more.
But, I think there’s a disconnect between the form and the content. The form over-promises.
I realize this is subjective, but if you want to keep me reading from chapter to chapter, I need a mystery, not just a pretty layout. And I need more compelling pull quotes than “Shaun isn't a fool. He’ll try to add a new trick” or “I’m the one in the bull’s-eye. I’ll get to that place where it hurts and you’re all alone.” You’re essentially promoting that the subject doesn't have anything that interesting to say.
Least Mobile Friendly
(Note: These were all tested with Safari on an iPhone 5. Unless otherwise noted, they either didn't open at all, or returned broken versions of the page.)
Portraits of the Hundreds of Children Killed by Guns Since Newtown | Mother Jones
Germany: Ally in U.S. ‘War on Terror’
(Didn’t even pull up a limited version of the site. Instead I got the message “Please visit this Web site on a desktop or tablet.” Oh, okay, totally reasonable to expect a reader to remember to do that the very next time they can.)
NHK Special: Disaster Big Data
(I knew this would be bad when I couldn't even open it in Chrome on my desktop).
In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters | New York Times
Reshaping New York | New York Times
I can’t believe I still have to say this in 2014, but if your project can’t be opened in a browser on a phone, you are actively alienating a large and growing portion of your audience.
You would never go to your home page editors and ask them to take a story off the home page, would you? Of course not. Well, more and more, people find stories by clicking on a link in an e-mail, a tweet, a text or a Facebook post on their phone. This trend will only continue and will likely be the main source of traffic for a lot of sites by the end of this year.
If that link doesn't open on mobile, you are saying you don’t care if they can access your work. And if you don’t care, I can’t imagine that your audience is going to go out of their way to care about your work. But they will absolutely remember the link didn't open the next time they see one to your site.
And keep in mind, you are virtually assuring that no one in five years is going to be able to see your work. Building a desktop-only project now is like building a site in Geocities in 1996. Your work will disappear on the sands of digital time.
Lastly, you don’t have to choose between innovative design and mobility. This ProPublica project shows that it’s possible to have both: China’s Memory Hole: The Images Erased From Sina Weibo.
Recommendations
So what should sites do to avoid these problems?
Hire, trust and empower producers: Ok, this is self-serving, but publishers, this is important. Topic editors, interactive designers and data journalists are not digital producers. They aren't trained to think about how their content interacts with the rest of a site or about how users get to content and interact with the site. Web producers need to be consulted early and often.
Assess your CMS: How hard does your CMS make it to integrate projects like these with the rest of the site? How hard is it to associate similar content in a compelling way (not just with an inline link)? Are you recreating the wheel each time you do something cool or is it reusable?
Think mobile first: Even though you've heard this a million times, it apparently bears repeating. If a project isn't accessible on a phone, I think it’s almost impossible to justify doing it.
