When MSN tried to explain technical analysis of stock charts in text, the explanation flopped. It was boring. When we did it in a multimedia framework, people loved it. Click on the image to play with the original. The presentation does require a Flash player.

The right way to tell a story on the web

Match media types to the content appropriately and make the interface fun to use

Experience has taught me that different types of media work better together than separately. In other words, text helps video, and vice versa. They complement each other.

Check out the explanation of technical analysis shown and linked here. Maybe there's a bit of pride of authorship involved (I keep mentioning this thing), but I'm comfortable arguing that this is a pretty good model.

This package was produced in answer to an obvious need. MSN Money had invested a lot of money in interactive stock charts. The charts offered users some pretty sophisticated technical analysis. But no one was using them. There was evidence users didn't understand technical analysis well enough to appreciate the value of the charts.

When we offered users textual articles that explained technical analysis, no one read them. The articles were pretty boring

What to do?

My multimedia team came up with this approach, which utilized all the media types appropriately, I think.

First, the presentation kicks off with the very friendly, reassuring presence of a narrator who appears in video. Elizabeth Strott had very little experience in front of a camera at the time (which explains why the clips are very short); but did a pretty good job for us here, all things considered. When this charming narrator assures us we will be able to go at our own pace, and might even be able to enjoy ourselves as we learn, a complex subject becomes a little less intimidating. Only video of a skilled explainer can establish this kind of personal connection.

Behind her, illustrations morph in synch with the video explanations. So it's "show and tell."

We put complete textual explanations into the package, as well. Those appear when the user hits "Read the article" option at the bottom of the submenu for each installment. So users who wanted plenty of detail could get the text.

Finally, the menus and the scheme of organization work very powerfully to put the user in the driver's seat, allowing the user to go back, pause, shift to a different subject, or repeat explanations as necessary. The atmosphere is comfortable, easy to manage, and reassuring. That's huge because, the second the user gets worried or confused, he's gone.

The result of all this work was that, broadly speaking, users found the multimedia explanation about four times as engaging as the textual version, as measured in clicks and time spent on the page.

People watched, and listened, and read, and learned.

The multimedia aspects of the Toxic Legacy series brought an unfolding tragedy to vivid life on internet, with the result that people in dire need got help. The framework is starting to look dated now, but at the time, it worked great.

Here's another example. This one dates back to my days as managing editor at The Record, a mid-sized newspaper in northern New Jersey, and to a special kind of storytelling challenge encountered there.

We had evidence that a remote and isolated enclave of hill people -- once familiarly known in New Jersey as "the Jackson Whites" and now known as the Ramapough Indians -- were suffering serious health problems accountable to the dumping of lead-based paint in the forests around their community. The paint had come from a Ford auto plant that had closed years earlier. One of our problems was that the isolated and somewhat inbred nature of the Ramapough community threatened to block reader empathy. To sustain interest in a complicated story, we felt we needed to bring the Ramapough people to life.

This was in 2004 or real early in 2005. At the time, I happened to be experimenting with the video player packaged into Flash 8. YouTube had not happened just yet. But clearly Flash video was ready for primetime.

The first videos for this project were shot by my son Tom. He wound up editing all of the videos for the project in the basement of our home. When we put the whole package together, we had something extraordinary, a package that won half a dozen national awards and was recognized by one of journalism's leading peer groups for setting "a standard to which larger publications and broadcast outlets should aspire."

Why was this package so effective?

i think because it used different media types appropriately, and combined them efficiently, in an interface that was fun to use.

Where we needed to introduce people as living, breathing human beings with serious health problems, we used video

Where we needed to report complex sets of numbers relating to the testing of groundwater at different locations, we used interactive maps and charts.

The main explanation -- a prettylong and complicated story -- demanded text, based on the sheer volume of detail.

In the end, it all worked together. Web traffic to the package on The Record's web site was about four times what we normally would have expected with a big story in the Sunday newspaper.

Tom Chatfield explaining exactly why video games are so captivating, at Ted. Photo is linked to the video.

How to keep people interested

We can all learn from the gaming industry. They do it with 'Flow'

Building applications that people like to use is the name of the game.

We want people to stick around, explore, learn about a product or institution, maybe look at some ads. When they do look at an ad, we want to convert them.

Many of us with editorial experience have spent a lot of our time kind of scratching our heads and wondering why users are constantly wandering off to look at someone else's article or app or ad. As we try to do better, opinion tends to come into play in powerful ways, along lines of, "I think this will work."

I have focused mostly on getting great data and building on that.

I learned a lot from data gathered while building multimedia applications at MSN, the Microsoft portal. Of course data isn't the only source of insight. Part of the answer came to me on a Saturday afternoon at home, when I observed my two college-age sons in deep hynosis over a video game, I think World of Warcraft. Well, there you go, I told myself. All we needed to do was figure out what makes video games so engaging. Then, just port those qualities into the media business.

I had some background in statistical methods for engineering new products and processes, and on that basis half expected that we would all spend a couple of months analyzing video games and breaking them down somehow, in search of the Holy Grail. But when I explained my thinking at a big meeting of uber-geeks in Redmond a couple of weeks later -- a meeting I had organized for this purpose -- it turned out one of them already had the answer.

"That's easy," he said. "It's flow."

Don't guess at what makes people happy. We have data. Read 'Flow."

He referred to the best-selling book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Csikszentmihalyi was chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago when he decided to focus his research efforts on what makes people happy. He wound up writing Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Half a dozen of us read the book that night. When we reconvened the next day, we were convinced that Csikszentmihalyi had done a lot of our work for us.

I should probably hurry up and add that Csikszentmihalyi is a very important presence in the interactive industry. No big stroke of genius on my part, here. I vividly recall visiting with Michael Zimbalist, who runs R&D for the New York Times, and noting the presence of a single book on his otherwise unbelievably tidy desk: Flow.

Point is, this stuff works.

Real users forget what they're doing

Face it, all us humans have trouble remembering stuff, and are easily confused

Stephen Few helps us understand that we do better with users and readers when we are realistic about limitations we all share

The longer I work in interface development, the more surprised and intrigued I am by the quirky psychological aspects.

The way our vision separates foreground from background, the role color plays, the hynotic power of imagery, all these factors play a huge part in the success or failure of any interface. And things don't always work the way we expect.

Thanks to Stephen Few, a world leader in the field of visual information, and Colin Ware, who researches perceptual psychology, we know that very limited short term memory controls a lot of user behavior. We humans forget what we are doing all the time. So scattering items of related information over a far-flung variety of pages will tend to test us. You can begin to get a grip on the nature of the problem by writing six double digit numbers on a piece of paper and then turning the paper over and trying to remember all six. Most people can't.

If we can't remember six numbers, how are we going to relate a long explanation of Cisco's financial results to a chart of the company's stock price, or a chart on past earnings?

Users give up, when we ask them to do that sort of thing.

"We should avoid fragmenting information ... by placing it on separate screens or in locations that we can't see without scrolling," Few tells us in Now You See It. For instance, if we see a pattern in a graph and then try to compare it to a pattern in another graph that is on another screen, we will no longer remember much of what we were looking at previously once we bring up the new screen. We'll end up bouncing back and forth betweeen separate displays, wasting time, interrupting the of thought, and becoming frustrated in the process."

But wait. This isn't a problem, it's an opportunity. If we can help the user deal with his limitations, that user is going to be more comfortable, more productive, and happier, and is going to stick around and flip the ads or aborb the product message.

In the same way, we find opportunity in the way we present choices to the user.

More is not better. When we ask users to make a choice, there is a "right" number of options.

As Barry Schwartz has explained brilliantly in The Paradox of Choice, too great a range of options tends to make us human beings uncomfortable. We just can't handle it. In response to too great a range, we tend to turn away.

Plus, the proper presentation of the individual options can make a huge difference. How many of us have marveled at the densely detailed appearance of the icons on the iPhone or the iPad, and become engrossed in examining one? They work!

Japanese industrial designers have made an art form out of packing small spaces with detail, to make individual options more interesting and engaging. When the details are organized the right way, with comparable items of information linked graphically, the detail helps us to understand and compare options. If you don't believe that matters, check out Keiji Ekuan's great book on industrial design in Japan, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunch Box

The pattern that succeeds is "eye candy in a grid."

Works in the lunch box. Works in the iPad.

Visual details that are easy to categorize -- like, this is the length of this video, this article has a photo, this one does not -- are helpful and reassuring to users. They help users make decisions. When the decision-making is easy and comfortable, users remain engaged.

Samples include drawings by colleagues Jennifer Gentry, Karen Bucher, Michael Dubrowa, and Paul McCaffrey

Click on the image to see the presentation in Flash, if you have Flash player loaded.

Graphics to explain the value of a product

This one told ad customers about the affluence of MSN Money's audience

When ad sales reps at MSN Money saw multimedia presentations of editorial subjects, they insisted that the multimedia team I was running should produce a similar presentation for them, one that would tell our customers about the extraordinary affluence of the MSN audience.

They made a good point. A thorough explanation of a product's benfits -- what it can do for the user -- is certainly not going to damage the product in the customer or user's eyes, and may very well increase the value, making the sales transaction easier.

By building such an explanation into a fun interactive framework, we made it fun to explore, and get the message across a lot more effectively.

My apologies if the presentation linked above doesn't fire up on Apple devices. Flash doesn't work on iPads and iPhones. It does work on most Apple computers. Again, this interface is built in JQuery, which works everywhere.

Okay, it's not all new media all the time

A great content experience still requires smart writing and smooth editing

Over the last seven years I assigned and line-edited packages that have won almost a dozen national awards for editorial quality, including the Loeb Award for online financial news twice in a row, in 2008 and 2009, while managing editor of MSN Money (unfortunately Microsoft has not maintained the award-winning material), as well as the Best Investigative award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in 2011, for The Shanghai Numbers and the Gold Medal from the Investigative Reportes and Editors (IRE) for Toxic Legacy.

In earlier years, I was named one of the nation's best business writers by the American Society of Newsaper Editors. They cited a series of stories I had written about competition between Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Here's a sample.

The Shanghai Numbers was recognized by the American Society of Business Editors and Writers both as the best investigative work done in 2010 and as the best use of web media. Click on image to see the original.

It pays to create excitement

Humans pay attention to anything that moves. It's a survival strategy. Worth remembering when designing interfaces.

I've led a lot of prize-winning development efforts, normally guiding both the technical and the content sides, and have learned from those experiences that time and money invested in a vividly visual, high impact presentation is time and money well spent. People like excitement and like to be entertained. If they get bored, they leave.

• Winner, Best Investigative Project, Society of American Business Editors and Writers, 2011.

• Winner, Best Web Multimedia, Society of American Business Editors and Writers, 2011.

Unfortunately Microsoft has not maintained award-winning work on MSN.

• The Loeb Award for Online, 2009. This is the country’s most prestigious award for financial news coverage. For MSN’s multimedia project on the travails of the American middle class, “Middle Class Crunch.”

• Winner, The Loeb Award for Online, 2008, for “Keeping Up With the Wangs.”

• Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, 2008, for “Keeping Up With the Wangs.”

• Gold Medal, the organization's highest award, from Investigative Reporters and Editors, 2006, as ME of The Record, for “Toxic Legacy” – a series on the dumping of lead paint by Ford Motor Company in the woods of northern New Jersey.

• Best Investigative Project, over 100,0000 circ, Society of Professional Journalists, 2006, for “Toxic Legacy”

• Best Special Feature, Internet, Editor and Publisher, 2006, for “Toxic Legacy”

• Finalist for the Online News Association's Knight Public Service Award, 2006, for “Toxic Legacy”

• Record writers won the Daniel Pearl Award for Investigative Journalism, New York City Deadline Club, both 2003 and 2004

• NYC Deadline Club's public service award for 2004

• NYC Silurian Club award for investigative journalism, spring 2004.

• Record and Ledger design staffs received dozens of awards from the national Society of Newspaper Design, including "Best in Show" for the Ledger in 2001

• Photo staff built at the Star-Ledger wins Pulitzer Prize for feature photography, 2001

• Record was named best major newspaper in New Jersey by the New Jersey Press Association three years in a row, 2003, 2004, 2005.

• As a reporter, I was named one of top news feature writers in the U.S. by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (category was business writing).

• Key player in content strategy for Microsoft as managing editor at MSN Money, one of the nation's largest and most successful web operations. Ran operations in the East. Expert on user psychology. Creator of multimedia products that have built audience, increased engagement radically, and won many national awards for editorial quality on the web

• Deep experience in revenue strategies associated with interactive advertising. Microsoft's delegate to national discussions with Nielsen, Comscore, IAB regarding advertising standards for rich media content.

• Deep experience of web partnering strategies both from the portal side, as Microsoft's delegate in meetings with key partners in New York, and from the POV of the content creators, such as TheStreet.

• Deep experience in print, as managing editor of one of the most respected mid-sized newspapers in the country, and in broadcast, through partnership with Cablevision, particularly with regard to web transitions, content sharing, and media convergence on the web.

• Technically astute or expert in web technologies important to the user experience: DOM scripting, Javascript, CSS, AS3/Flash, all aspects of interactive video.

• Winner of the Loeb Award for online coverage of financial news – the nation’s most prestigious award in the field – both in 2008 in 2009. Winner of the web media award from the Society of American Business Writers and Editors (SABEW) in 2011, as well as the 2011 SABEW award for investigative journalism. Winner of the Gold Medal from the national society of Investigative Reporters and Editors in 2006, for the multimedia project “Toxic Legacy.” Many others.

Experience

June, 2009 to Present: Consultant, interactive media, UX, UI, through kinnective.com, with special interest in the psychological appeal of game-like interfaces and strategies that create compelling value in the not-always-logical mind of the user.

June, 2010 to March, 2012: Director of Product Development, TheStreet.com, guiding design and technical specs on all of the site's web products.Thestreet.com is one of the nation’s largest financial news sites. Special responsibility for development of new approaches to multimedia, interactive video, and interactive charts. Responsibility for business analysis on new products, coordination of staffing, and coordination with tech team re the build process.

April, 2006 to May, 2009: Managing Editor, MSN Money, and project manager on several ambitious multimedia development projects. Developed several breakthrough video and multimedia platforms for Microsoft. Led the team that engineered MSN’s first use of Flash video. Built a desktop-based video studio in midtown Manhattan, fully replicating broadcast functionality at a fraction of the cost. Hired and trained a new multimedia team. One staffer crisscrossed China with a video camera in a knapsack, documenting the rise of the Chinese middle class in “Keeping Up with the Wangs,” a project that won the Loeb Award for online content in 2008. A follow-up project, “Middle Class Crunch,” won the Loeb in 2009.

Jan to March, 2006: Internet consultant at the New York Daily News. Developed a plan to rebuild the web presence of the country's fifth largest newspaper.

2001 to 2006: Managing Editor, The Record, New Jersey. Supervision of a news staff of 250 at the newspaper that dominated investigative coverage and editorial awards at the state level, despite competition from a rival three times its size. Led continuous improvement effort in the newsroom. In 2005, the newspaper produced a web-based multimedia investigative project entitled “Toxic Legacy.” In recognizing this project with a gold medal, its highest award, the national Society of Investigative Reporters and Editors called the project a “landmark work” and added:

"This work stood out not only for its exhaustive reporting and clear writing, but for its riveting multimedia presentation, which set a standard to which larger publications and broadcast outlets should aspire."

1995 to 2000: Assistant Managing Editor, Electronic-News, The Star-Ledger, New Jersey: Planned and led one of the nation’s most aggressive and most successful media convergence efforts, integrating TV, web, and print coverage at News12 New Jersey, njo.com, and the Star-Ledger. Built low-cost system to automate Star-Ledger news feeds to the web. Trained print reporters for on-air reports at no cost and coordinated their efforts with TV staff.

1993 to 1995: Team Leader, Star-Ledger digital color transition team. Developed seamless end-to-end composition and prepress systems at the Star-Ledger, investing $2 million to build what was recognized the next year as one of the top color printing programs in the country. This system became the standard for other Newhouse newspapers across the country.

1986 to 1994: Photo, design, graphics editor, The Star-Ledger. Planned and installed digital photo systems, eliminating film and cutting costs. Planned and implemented a quality control system for photos and graphics, based on the statistical principles of Edwards Demming. Hired and developed photo team that later won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. Hired and trained design staff that went on to win the "Best in Show" award from the national Society of Newspaper Design the same year.

Awards

• Winner, Best Investigative Project, Society of American Business Editors and Writers, 2011.

• Winner, Best Web Multimedia, Society of American Business Editors and Writers, 2011.

• The Loeb Award for Online, 2009. This is the country’s most prestigious award for financial news coverage. For MSN’s multimedia coverage regarding the travails of the American middle class, “Middle Class Crunch.”

• Winner, The Loeb Award for Online, 2008, for “Keeping Up With the Wangs.”

• Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, 2008, for “Keeping Up With the Wangs.”

• Gold Medal, the organization's highest award, from Investigative Reporters and Editors, 2006, as ME of The Record, for “Toxic Legacy” – a series on the dumping of lead paint by Ford Motor Company in the forests of northern New Jersey.

• Best Investigative Project, over 100,0000 circ, Society of Professional Journalists, 2006, for “Toxic Legacy”

• Best Special Feature, Internet, Editor and Publisher, 2006, for “Toxic Legacy”

• Finalist for the Online News Association's Knight Public Service Award, 2006, for “Toxic Legacy”

• Record writers won the Daniel Pearl Award for Investigative Journalism, New York City Deadline Club, both 2003 and 2004

• NYC Deadline Club's public service award for 2004

• NYC Silurian Club award for investigative journalism, spring 2004.

• Record and Ledger design staffs received dozens of awards from the national Society of Newspaper Design, including "Best in Show" for the Ledger in 2001

• Photo staff built at the Star-Ledger wins Pulitzer Prize for feature photography, 2001

• Record was named best major newspaper in New Jersey by the New Jersey Press Association three years in a row, 2003, 2004, 2005.

• As a reporter, Art was named one of top news feature writers in the U.S. by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (category was business writing).

Education

Columbia College, New York, BA English (Merit Scholar)

Regis High School, New York

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