[HN Gopher] Communicating with Interactive Articles
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       Communicating with Interactive Articles
        
       Author : conanxin
       Score  : 63 points
       Date   : 2023-02-12 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (distill.pub)
 (TXT) w3m dump (distill.pub)
        
       | Towaway69 wrote:
       | Having clicked through some of the publications, I began to
       | wonder whether the challenge of mobile v. desktop is a factor.
       | 
       | 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.
        
       | cscheid wrote:
       | Distill was one of the best experiments in publishing of the last
       | decade, no irony. Unfortunately, it's worth reflecting on why
       | they are on a hiatus that I fear will be (understandably)
       | permanent.
       | 
       | 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.
        
         | amitp wrote:
         | I loved Distill! My own experience with interactive content
         | (not through Distill) was that it was so much extra work that
         | it was hard to justify, except as a passion project, so I
         | wasn't surprised by their (permanent) hiatus.
        
       | wcedmisten wrote:
       | I thought this part was interesting:
       | 
       | > 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...
        
         | Veuxdo wrote:
         | Very interesting. I'm working on on app that has "slides" users
         | click a button to progress through. Now I'm wondering if users
         | would prefer to "scroll" through the content instead.
        
           | sethherr wrote:
           | I can say there has never been a time where I've preferred
           | having a button instead of scrolling.
           | 
           | 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).
        
         | Kinrany wrote:
         | Note that this is the same as us programmers preferring to have
         | a single interface for many things instead of several mutually
         | incompatible ones.
         | 
         | 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.
        
         | staunton wrote:
         | The number to compare to would be the fraction of "readers" who
         | actually read (most of) the article. I have a hunch it's also a
         | small fraction.
        
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       (page generated 2023-02-12 23:01 UTC)