Advice & inspiration

Multimedia Tip: Five quick fixes to enhance your next interactive

While judging the last quarter of SNDies, I came across an interactive by The Detroit News, titled “Why Michiganians are leaving the state and where they’re going.” Although I was impressed with the time and effort they invested in this package, I also noted several quick fixes that could have elevated this from a mediocre presentation to an exceptional piece.

Using it as a reference, I came up with a list of five suggestions to improve any multimedia presentation.

1) Promote your best content first to attract your user’s attention.
In this case, a video of a talking head introduced this package. As a viewer, why do I care about this guy? Why should I become invested? Show me him leaving his tearful family to work in Vegas. If the budget doesn’t allow the travel, just show me anything else about his life other than a talking head. Documentary style videos always work to bring emotion and background information into a presentation without having to use animated text or one-man interviews.

2) Keep the navigation consistent throughout, and do not hide any content within secondary or tertiary navigations.
Arguably one of the hardest parts in post production is organizing the presentation into one user-friendly navigation. In this interactive, a tremendous amount of information is hidden within the “National Movement” header. If the user clicks on “’06-’07 Examined,” you see three more tabs — essentially a tertiary level of content. Although the content provided here is great, the tabs swap places depending on user interaction. For the programmer, this probably made sense. But as the user, it can be extremely confusing, especially since two tabs say nearly the same thing.

3) Never auto play a long animation or multimedia content. Let the user decide when he or she is ready.
After clicking on “Economic factors,” the user is presented with a creative display to compare Michigan’s economy to that of the U.S. The only downside is that it plays instantly, before the user has even read the supplemental information, or decided that he/she is willing to invest the time needed. Same goes for initial audio/video … if you decide to force it at the user, at the very least provide a stop button. It would be even better to provide a play button and let them decide when to start the animation.

4) If you have the option of customizing a fool-proof media player instead of using a home-made presentation, do it!
Soundslides, SlideShowPro, and a Flash video player like Jeroen Wijering’s are all great multimedia players. Yes, they are widely used and not extremely creative, but they all do an excellent job at displaying your content in a high-quality fashion. It is fairly easy to customize each player, allowing producers to change the font family, size, color, and even the navigation buttons (in Soundslides’ case). In the Detroit piece, I really wanted to see the photography played up in a high-quality Soundslides or SlideShowPro gallery.

5) If you present an audio or video file, always have a progress bar and time controls.
We cannot assume viewers will stick around to watch/listen to a timed presentation if they never know how long they will have to sit there. Once the user clicks on “National Movement” and clicks the play button, an audio file begins, synced to several map files. The user never knows if it is a 30 second or five minute clip, nor can they pause the audio if they want to examine a particular map more closely.

Please let it be known that I am not using this interactive as an example of bad multimedia. The wealth of data presented was exceptional, and the variety of presentations utilized to visualize this data was much appreciated. In their case, they had almost all of the right elements, they just needed a little fine-tuning in the final presentation.

Other posts that might interest you:

• Vuvox: An innovative storytelling tool or an over-rated component?
• When it comes to multimedia, design is everything
• Guantanamo Bay interactive presents data effectively

© 2010 Innovative Interactivity (II).
Download II's Security Policy (PDF)