Traditional Media Web Sites Are Always the Worst
I think I’ve written about this before. But I’m going to do it again with a different spin.
Why are traditional media web sites (CTV, CNN, the Globe and Mail, Canada.com, etc.) always the worst? They are quite possibly the most poorly thought out, the least accessible, and the most annoying to read of any industry of major web sites.
Apart from the fact that they are too cluttered (often trying to make their front pages look like their newspaper’s front page, forgetting the fact that we’re dealing with monitors not newsprint), they often have annoying little slide shows or “interactive” stories exploiting (and I chose that word quite deliberately) Flash.
Let’s choose, for example, CBC’s interactive food safety map. I hate to pick on CBC, because I think they are among the best at maintaining a well-designed web presence, however, this is an excellent example of what I’m writing about.
Problem #1: how is this interactive? I can click on a picture and then see text relating to it. Is this really what interactive means? Maybe my expectations are too high.
Problem #2: why couldn’t this have been presented as a list with an image and some text broken into sections/categories. They could have even had one category per page and made a “slide show” using real HTML pages, eliminating Flash altogether. Maybe this interactive map is just a way of disguising their lack of real content.
Problem #3: how can people who can’t read embedded Flash text read this? It is entirely unaccessible. What makes it most frustrating is that there is no good reason for using Flash.
Problem #4: Flash. Okay, so this is the common problem among everything I have said already. I think the important thing to understand about Flash is thus: Flash is an acceptable web site component only when you are trying to present content that is otherwise ill-suited for a web browser environment. These include: games, movies (think YouTube), and other multimedia content unfit for HTML. This does not include advertising or any other means for presenting otherwise static content.
Problem #5: it’s annoying to use. I have to click to bring up the content I want. Click again to hide it. Click again to bring up the next set. It scores very low on my usability scale and does not ever make me want to view an interactive tidbit at CBC (regardless of how much I like CBC) again.
When I see things like this happen, it makes me wonder if it’s the web designers who are trying to show-off their fancy Flash skills because they’re bored of designing conservative web sites for their media companies, or if it’s mid- to high-level managers trying to make their respective media companies keep up with the Jones’ because “everyone is doing Flash.” I would really like to know.
