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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
One simple thing they could have done would be let you click on the airplane to stay, or, alternatively, have a button which says "Start Here". I didn't realize the top three buttons were actually buttons initially.
In terms of content, I think some analysis would be good, given that most people have absolutely no context for how airplanes work and what potential scenarios may have befallen the flight.
Re font problem: same experience on Mac, tested on both Chrome and Firefox nightly. The creator should choose a different font. Some images are small and the font and color of texts used in some of these images make reading hard.
Another pet peeve is I hate scrolling down. I hate this kind of design. Why leaving 1/4 of the page statically useless... I don't have to constantly scroll back and forth just to navigate around.
Anyway, this is a cool presentation. though it'd be really nice if audio is supplemented. This would be make a great video presentation.
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.
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.
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.