Great public service package, but design doesn't do it justice

Will Yurman, staff photographer of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, emailed me yesterday requesting a critique on this audio slideshow package that documents homicide victims in the Rochester community. He's the first to email asking for a critique since I added the "email links" message in the sidebar. Woo hoo! Keep them coming to angelabgrant [at] gmail [dot] com.

First off, the journalism backing this package is absolutely top notch. I watched four of the 12 audio slideshows in this package. Will attended the funerals and families' homes and did in-depth interviews with loved ones to find out humanizing details about the deceased person. The photos and audio are interesting and the stories keep moving, so it's easy to watch them to the end. The slideshows make it impossible to think of homicide as a statistic. You find out who the person was, and you see the grieving loved ones who will miss him or her so much. What Will is doing is a great public service for his community. Good work!

I like the design of each slideshow page. You see a mug on the left and some facts about the murder, including whether the murderer was brought to justice. It's refreshing to see a slideshow that ISN'T soundslides (not that I dislike Soundslides; but I DO dislike generic).

I have a question for Will: Do you release these slideshows individually as they happen? I think that would be the most successful presentation for them. This won't be very successful if you release it all at once at the end of the year. There's a huge amount of data here, and it'll take a considerable amount of time to absorb all of it at once. People usually don't spend that amount of time on one web site, especially on multimedia. They'll watch one or two, run out of time, then forget about all of it. That means a bunch of hard work down the drain! However, if you are releasing them individually and then just providing this flash package as an archival system, that is a great idea.

I have a huge problem with most of the design though. First, I hate the intro because the text comes in one line at a time. I can read faster than that. Just bring it in all at once. THANK YOU for putting a "skip intro" button. It would be better if there were some visual elements on the intro page because it would hook your viewer better. What if the intro text showed up at left, and at right a photo montage of mugs of some of the homicide victims? For example:



Next, the design of the index page, where you click the names to see the slideshows, is fatally flawed. This is a visual story: Where are the visuals? There is so much data: Where is the organization? I think this is an example of a "warehouse" story that Mindy McAdams was talking about yesterday. I see that the names are arranged chronologically by death date, but it's still hard to see. MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over (that was my journalism professor Marvin Olasky's favorite expression when a student's writing was boring).

I think if you created a visual timeline graphic that would be better. You could do a timeline broken down by month that slides back and forth sort of like the index I created for this roller derby story. You would put the info, names AND mugs above the timeline. If you like this idea and need information about how to create a scrolling index, please post a comment and I'll post a tutorial later.

That's not the only way you could organize it. I've seen two homicide packages that profiled victims, and both of them arranged the data on a map. I think the benefit of that organizational structure is that when people look at the map, they're naturally going to want to know about the homicides that happen near where they live or work. The coding for that would be considerably harder.

I want to stress again that I am very impressed with the journalism behind this package. I think the design needs to reflect that same level of excellence. It's very important because it will correlate directly with how many people actually ABSORB that journalism.

Will, thank you so much for putting yourself in the hot seat! I encourage any other readers to add rants or raves: Be honest, but always constructive.

Also, everyone send me more links!