Weblog for New Media Storytelling

Posted: 11:45 a.m. 10/29/01

Interactivity of a multimedia Web site

The Feedroom is a video news site that compiles clips from local stations around the country to give a full picture of the news of the day. But it has its problems with interactivity. While technically impressive, the site's forward-thinking nature is muddled in control problems.

From the site's home page, a large window pops up that the viewer is expected to navigate -- with no navigation controls. As long as your are on this site, these controls won't come back as much as you would love, beg, plead for them to return. Feedroom is firmly at the controls of their site, and the user has to work within their matrix.

Not that this interface is a good one, either. The left-side menu changes by the day, making it more topical but less organized. "America fights back, American on alert, World in Crisis, Ground zero" are some of the menu items on one sample day. Considering how all the footage on this site is taken from local stations and affiliates (including Chicago's WGN), the different between these categories isn't huge. Also, below this menu, is a box encouraging the viewer to "Watch more stories" by clicking on tiny links that have no meaning or identification. It turns out they load different stories into the window below the box, but no viewer is going to know this.

Against the 'net grain

With menus and options as muddles as these, it seems Feedroom is going for the passive viewer. They want the viewer who will sit and click randomly, not a viewer who is actively searching for information or seeking a quick viewing experience. In other words, they are dumbing down the Internet by stripping away everything that makes the Internet a quasi-"electronic brain."

And for this site, one with very much potential, these problems are especially disappointing. Feedroom's managers keep the site up to date with breaking news from local angles, and in our newly expanded national consciousness, this makes the news more interesting to outsiders instead of less interesting. It gives outsiders an insider feeling about news they should know. Technically, the site is very impressive as well, mixing high-quality video with flash animation. In my viewing, the video never burped and gave out.

How to improve

If the site were more interactive and featured more viewer control, the site would be terrific. But as of now, the obtrusive control it imposes allow no such freedom. Some recommendations to improve:

• Consistent menus. The menus must stay the same if people are to build familarity with the site. If the menus change every day and the clips move every day, few people will return to the site. Example: In the Bruce Springsteen newsgroup I read regularly, someone shortly after Sept. 11 pointed out a Feedroom clip from New York's NBC affiliate, a montage of the events with Springsteen's version of "We Shall Overcome" playing in the background. As more fans heard about this and attempted to find the link, they failed. At least a couple dozen times, people posted to the newsgroup, wondering where the video was, and other hunted through the site and posted the new link in reply. It was a waste of everyone's time, and the confusion probably kept some people away from the site.
• Archives, or at least some type of clip history. Clips once featured on the site's front page may disappear into other pages or off the site altogether. Feedroom producers need to create an indexing system that tells viewers where their favorite clips are and give them an easy way to load them.

• Community features. The audience is currently kept as outsiders on the site, only having options to view clips and choose their connection speed. In addition to not being able to interact with each other, they cannot interact with the site's managers as well. The sparsity of the "Help" section makes it best left in quote marks.
• Finally, back off Jack. Feedroom designers need to let standard browser controls run their site. Stripping away these controls is unnecessary and hurts the viewer's sense of direction. Also, in their daily newsletter and "send this clip" e-mails, they use graphics-heavy HTML-enhanced form. They is of course annoying to viewers who cannot see the HTML presented and also takes the e-mails longer to download. If people like your site enough to want to be reminded of it, no one needs to see how pretty it is.

Feedroom is very promising, but the viewers need room to breathe. The Internet should be under their control, not the producers.