
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 Infographics - uptown
http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/14/MH370/index.html
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danso
These are well-done graphics and Reuters Graphics has an excellent
stylebook...but just to be a nag...this strikes me as a good example of how
custom Web navigation can be counterproductive for the reader.

I'm sure most people can figure out that the top three images are meant to be
buttons, but I'll admit that I didn't notice, at first, that when you click
each subhed-button, a "Next" option pops up in the top right, along with page-
boxes to the top left. It's obvious once you've noticed them, _but the trick
is noticing them in the first place_ , which you might not because your eyes
immediately jump down to the graphic. How many users, after seeing the initial
graphic, immediately click on one of the other subhead buttons, thus seeing
only a total of 3 graphics?

An equally problematic issue is that there's no way to deep-link any of the
items. I can't easily discuss a specific graphic (and they're hard to locate
via rightclicking, as they're embedded via svg tag) here, or even one of the
subnav-topics, without fully describing the actual graphic...which is a real
inconvenience. The use of clickable gray boxes as pagination only adds to the
inconvenience, because now I have to count which box I'm on.

I think this would've been better served by having each sub-topic be a long,
scrollable webpage...as it is now, you _already_ have to scroll to read most
of these graphics. Once you get done with one graphic, you have to scroll back
to the top, click "Next", and then read through...at least have a "Next" at
the bottom.

The main argument for having this compact nav is to invite quicker comparison
between slides...I don't think that's a great argument even in the best of
cases, but here, because of the vertically-long slides, it's not even
applicable. It'd be far easier to flip back between sequential graphics by
simply scrolling.

OK, that was a lot of nagging, but I hate to see great work obfuscated by
"gee-whiz" navigational design that is user-unfriendly. I would discuss the
graphics but like I said, it's kind of a pain to specify and describe each
particular slide without deeplinks.

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nkoren
tl;dr: Designers, please think about ordinary-sized screens!

This presentation may have good design _within_ it, but it is not actually
_presented_ well. It is intended to be a series of slides which appear on
single screens. However between its thick header and insanely thick header,
there is not enough real estate on the screen to view a full slide on my 13"
MacBook Pro. So I have to scroll down to view the bottom of the slide, then
scroll up again to click the navigation element, then scroll down again to
view the full slide, etc. It's incredibly aggravating.

So I've just hacked the CSS to set the header and footer to display:none. Not
an auspicious way to begin an interaction!

~~~
kbenson
Generally, I just right click on the component, select _inspect element_ , and
then press delete (after possibly making sure the root element of the
offending feature was actually selected).

~~~
nkoren
How is it that I never figured out that was possible?!? Thank you!

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zhte415
Excellent presentation.

On the presentation, it does feel like a stew with all the right ingredients
but without seasoning to fully appreciate the taste. Seasoning not meaning
editorial content, but a glue to hold the how and why together, and understand
the combination of the taste.

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JazCE
I'm not a designer, so i speak as a consumer.

I disagree with complements on the look of this. I kind of feel it's misisng
something, which i can't quite pin down. perhaps it's the look of the maps,
that they don't quite match the rest of the feel. The sources text in FF28
W7x64 doesn't look particuarly good, not very ledgible.

maybe it's just an overall static and clinical look that i don't quite like
(which is odd as i do like industrial design).

I think it possibly needs a bit more art direction. but i'm a consumer so what
do i know.

~~~
steven777400
Agreed. The fonts render terribly on Chrome Windows 7 on my machine.

Also, I kept expecting to be able to scroll and it took a little while to
figure out how to navigate the pages. The nav bar at the top could serve dual-
purpose: allow the user to click on a particular box while also allowing
scrolling and showing the user's current position in the content.

~~~
samcrawford
Identical experience here. The fonts looked so bad in Chrome that I opened FF
(which I very rarely do) to see how they compared, and it was far more
readable in FF.

