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Episode #124: Eileen Webb
175 Plays7 years ago
Eileen Webb is a digital strategist and co-founder of webmeadow, a firm that helps progressive organizations develop content and technology strategies to make the world a better place. Her background is in server-side coding and being that odd person who...
The post Episode #124: Eileen Webb appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to PolicyViz Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. Thanks so much for tuning back into the show. On this week's show, we're going to talk about data visualization interactivity and scrolly telling and all the things that move around on your favorite website.
Aileen Webb on 'Your Interactives Make Me Sick'
00:00:27
Speaker
And I was inspired to have an episode about this because of my guest's great article that she recently wrote for Source. So I'm really excited to have Aileen Webb, who is the Director of Strategy and Livestock at Web Meadow.
00:00:39
Speaker
to help me talk about her recent article on Source, Your Interactives Make Me Sick, which is, by the way, Eileen, a great title. Thank you. And also all this other stuff about interactivity. So, Eileen, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Aileen's Background and Experience with Migraines
00:00:54
Speaker
Yes, and I'm excited we get to chat because I love this piece, because you take a perspective on interactives that I hadn't really considered before. So it's great to sort of like, I think our views line up perfectly, but each from like different sides, which is great. But before we talk more about the piece and other things,
00:01:16
Speaker
Could you take a moment and just talk a little bit about yourself so people know who you are and where you're coming from? Sure. So I am a content strategist, focused a lot on structures and systems and CMSs and things like that. So if you're a person who writes, I'm the person who sort of advocates for you having a nice experience to actually put stuff into the CMS. My background is as like a backend programmer for CMSs. And then I shifted into doing strategy stuff because I like telling people what to do.
How Interactive Sites Affect Users with Migraines
00:01:46
Speaker
And for the purposes of this conversation, another piece of background for me is that I have had migraines since I, well, since puberty really, so like 25, 30 years at this point. And I have chronic migraines, which means that I have about 50, 60% of my days are days that I have headaches in any given month.
00:02:08
Speaker
And so i'm very sensitive to motion and i sort of bright lights and sounds and all kinds of things just all the time very sensitive neurology. Right you're sensitive person i can i can tell the two minutes we've been talking so you've identified some of the triggers for yourself that trigger some of these migraines.
00:02:28
Speaker
And clearly your work on making CMSs better and helping people make better sites, I would assume is partly born out of that. So can you talk a little bit about this article and source about how websites make you and others who might have vision or motion challenges, how it might make that experience? Well, I guess in your case, nauseating. Sure.
00:02:47
Speaker
So yeah, so I, I'm a big nerd, right? Like, I like data, I like data sets, I like graphs and charts and things. And so when people come out with cool, like, scrolly telling articles, I will often click over to them, right? And I'm like, Ooh, I want to learn about, you know, Twitter bots or the Colorado River water usage or like whatever stuff people are talking about. And very often as I start to scroll through the site, there'll be some kind of
00:03:13
Speaker
sort of nifty kind of fancy interactive feature that sort of messes with motion in some way it's sometimes it's like sometimes it's parallax right so there's like a peep things in the foreground in the background are moving at different rates and sometimes it is graphs where all of a sudden you're scrolling down and then you keep moving your thing like you're scrolling down but the graph starts to animate sideways
00:03:37
Speaker
And those kinds of things are actually just really hard for my brain to deal with, like I can feel myself getting nauseated. And so I end up either skipping past them entirely, but mostly I just end up closing the window. And so I don't I like just literally skip all of those articles that I'm interested in, but like, they've been presented in a way that I literally cannot process them healthily.
From Twitter Critique to Full Article
00:03:57
Speaker
So I started writing out that sort of I started complaining about it on Twitter, and then I decided to turn it into an actual like proper article and maybe give people some advice on how to avoid it.
00:04:08
Speaker
Always the right way to start is just critique on Twitter and then write the longer more thoughtful piece, right? Okay. So yeah, so I so I looked through some a bunch of sort of example sites of like cool things that people had made in the last few months and and found some patterns in the way that in the way that things were problematic and things are often problematic I think because
00:04:30
Speaker
we sort of mess with the physics of the browser, like the browser actually has physics, right? Like you, you scroll a certain amount with your finger or you press the arrow key up or down and, and there's an expectation of what kind of movement that is going to trigger. And we've had years and years and years of training of like, here's what happens when you move your finger a quarter inch on the trackpad or on your mouse ball or whatever.
00:04:53
Speaker
And so when people mess with that, it's kind of the same thing as being in like, I just went to Universal Studios a few weeks ago. And so it's sort of like being in one of those like 4D rides where you put on the glasses and they like, like Star Tours style, right? Where they like, make you think you're falling down a hole because they're just sort of playing with the physics of what you're looking at. But no one's doing anything nearly as cool as Star Tours on journalism websites.
00:05:23
Speaker
Well, I can say, I mean, I don't know. It was like for you, but we, I went to universal a couple of years ago and we went to the Simpsons ride, which is one of those 40 rides and everybody got, got sick. So I don't know how you managed. I took a lot of breaks, uh, and, and frankly did not enjoy the rides that much. Um, I liked the Dr. Seuss rides. They were about my speed. I was like, Oh, snitches. Yay.
00:05:46
Speaker
Yeah. So it's mostly this contrary to what you would expect in some ways, right? Like you mentioned earlier, scrolling down to the page and suddenly the graph is moving in the opposite direction. Yeah. And there's also a lot around just sort of scrolljacking in general.
Understanding Scrolljacking
00:06:02
Speaker
So like moving sometimes when we'll still be moving down the page, but the physics will change a little bit so that like something in the left hand column is moving at a different speed than something in the right hand column, usually for some sort of data effect, right? To sort of show how, uh, you know, a diaspora spread over a geographic area or to show how something moved over time or, um, you know, there's all kinds of things, even in like the original, um,
00:06:32
Speaker
in like snowfall, there was there was a whole set of like three images of the mountain that would spin around and show you like where the avalanche happened. And they just sort of something you do on the page triggers a huge amount of like visual motion that is very disorienting for someone who has any sort of visual processing issues or, or really any kind of like
00:06:55
Speaker
nausea tendencies or motion sickness tendencies and that's of course like for me that's very acute all the time but it's also the kind of thing that if you didn't get enough sleep last night or like you're maybe a little bit under the weather or you know you were on a bumpy bus this morning or maybe you're on a train right now that's rocking back and forth it's not necessarily someone who has like a chronic medical condition it might just be someone who's in a situation where they're like yep this is too much for my threshold
00:07:24
Speaker
Yeah, I was gonna ask, does it depend on whether you're at a desktop or whether you're on a mobile device, a phone or a tablet?
00:07:32
Speaker
For me, it really doesn't. I think everyone's threshold is different and there are certainly sometimes because of responsive sites and because of the way that they are programmed, sometimes the implementation on one device will be problematic or the implementation on another device isn't, which is part of why I think when I talked about in the article a little bit, the idea of giving people the choice of whether or not they're going to sort of engage in your interactiveness
00:07:57
Speaker
Because, because it really is up to the person. And it might be that on a Tuesday morning on their phone, it's fine. But on a Thursday afternoon on their tablet, it's not fine. As a creator, you cannot predict that, right? You can't like, you can't know everything about people's context.
Empowering Users with Control
00:08:14
Speaker
And so giving the user the choice for what how they're going to experience your information, rather than forcing something on them, feels to me like just a more sane and and healthy to go.
00:08:27
Speaker
So when you think about choice in that way let's take snow falling you know most people listen to the show probably have gone through snowfall at least multiple times. So when you think about choice in the example of snowfall with the 3d presentation of the of the mountain.
00:08:44
Speaker
Do you think about choice being the ability, not so much that it triggers this motion in the 3D model, so the user selects when that happens, or is it more, let's just make this a fully text-based approach where it's sort of like a separate environment altogether?
00:09:02
Speaker
I think there's some of each and some of this is going to be like what the effect you're going for is and some of it is honestly going to be like internal political like in your organization who gets excited by which thing and what kinds of things get funded right like realistically speaking like there are there are all kinds of sort of human factors in this.
00:09:21
Speaker
I think the simplest way for a lot of these things is just literally to put a play button on them or a pause button. I tend to like the idea that we should not assume consent in anything, but especially on the web, that we should start with things paused and let people press play if they would like to see motion. Because there are things that are actually completely fine for my brain to deal with as long as they're not unexpected.
00:09:45
Speaker
Um, like a lot of the kinds of animations in snowfall are like, obviously they're cool, right? Like seeing the path of the avalanche and everything is really interesting, but it needs to be on my terms. It needs to be where I'm like, okay, I'm sitting in a place in a well-lit room. I'm ready to press play on this. Um, as opposed to someone else just saying like, you got to this point in the article, here we go.
00:10:06
Speaker
At the same time, I think we do tend to do a lot of stuff that is fancy for the sake of being fancy. And there are times when a text alternative and like a well-written alternative is a really viable option. One of the things I touched on in my article is the idea that we
00:10:26
Speaker
In 2018, right now, with the state of the web where it is, a lot of people on the web are on a page because they want to read it, right? Not because they want to watch it or experience it or immerse themselves in it, but because they want to read a story. And we, I think we forget that sometimes and we try to be like sort of super fancy and interactive to the detriment of like letting it so that people who want to read can just read a story. Right.
00:10:56
Speaker
I mean, I think, I don't know about your perspective, but I think there's been in some ways a pullback from interactivity, at least in Dataviz, where a lot of things seem to be moving back towards static graphs. And I would guess that's because they're cheaper to make and they're easier to make. And I'm not sure you get a lot of value of clicking on the column chart and seeing the tool tip pop up. But I'm not sure if you see the same things in a lot of the work that you're doing and the websites that you visit.
00:11:24
Speaker
I think that is true among people who are paying attention, if that makes sense. I think there is a subset of people who are caring about this stuff. And it's the same thing with responsive sites in general right now. I think it's the same kind of trend is that for a while, people were like, look at all the cool stuff you can do. HTML5 is amazing. And then people were like, oh, it's actually really hard to do this well.
00:11:52
Speaker
And we do better with our budgets and our energy and our attention to sort of be simpler, to do simple things very well instead of to be sort of fancy pants for no reason. Or for a reason that is great but doesn't have an ROI that sort of warrants the money and the time and the attention.
00:12:09
Speaker
But I also think that that's like, we probably see that more because we care about that stuff. And I think that there's a much bigger number of people out in the world who are having their own journey of discovery and getting to a point where they're like, do you know what you can do with HTML5? And then wanting to do something really exciting. And like, I assume they're going to the point, you know, in a couple years where they're like, Oh, this is harder than it looks. But we sort of we're sort of seeing it as an early trend because we're nerds.
00:12:38
Speaker
Yeah, I also wonder for the casual reader of data driven news reporting, that when they see the cool interactive thing at the Times or the Washington Post, they're drawn to that because everybody's sort of gets excited about the cool new shiny thing. And they go to that cool new shiny thing. And it would be interesting to know how many of those people actually read the thing or, you know, get to the first cool shiny little bubble and then say, okay, I'm that I don't really care.
00:13:06
Speaker
Well, and are the cool shiny things being put on the right things, right? Like are we advertising things about, I don't know, like convertible bond markets or something that like already have a niche audience and have this complex data. And so we're using.
00:13:20
Speaker
fancy shiny stuff? Or are we using it for like, sort of more popular story? I feel like I see it a lot on stories that are like, that are just so niche that it's like, this is great that you spent all this energy on this. But like, I don't know who's gonna read it. Right? No, I think that's right. And I think your point about the ROI is really interesting. I, you know, I was talking to someone yesterday actually, or for workshop of, you know, what is the ROI to to a data vis?
00:13:43
Speaker
And i'm trying to think about you know what is that curve look like because i don't think it's a line that's sort of just curving downward right i think it you know there's like. The bar chart you make an excel real quickly and then you put a little more time into it you get a lot more of the goes up on that and then there's a point where diminishing returns where you're.
00:14:02
Speaker
making things fancier for no real payoff and so those might be the interactive static graphs right where it's like i can click on a line and that line highlights but okay really doesn't do anything for me and then i get to these more scroll the telling super fancy things but presumably there they have their own separate curve different part of the funding and how much it cost to make those things yeah and are those
The Cost and Impact of Interactivity in Storytelling
00:14:25
Speaker
are those things that couldn't be told any other way.
00:14:28
Speaker
Right, right. Like sometimes there are some things where like a graph or a chart is incredibly illuminating. And then there are sometimes when you're like, yep, that's pretty much the same thing you said in two sentences. And as this didn't, you know, this did not illuminate from the like heart of the story. I mean, I think that's the key question, right? Like, when is it time to put in these big investments into these big narrative, fancy things? And when is it not? And I feel like we still don't really have a great grasp on that.
00:14:55
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm sure it's different for every publication too. But the fact that, I don't know if this is a fact, this feels to me like something that most editorial sort of guidelines don't even touch on.
00:15:12
Speaker
It feels to me like the choices are all being made kind of one off where someone in the newsroom would get excited about doing some particular visualization. And there's not any sort of formal process to say like, is this the right visualization right now?
00:15:30
Speaker
Because I mean, and that makes sense because we generally don't build those kinds of guidelines and processes until we sort of had enough experience with the outcomes of all of them to realize that like, Oh, sometimes this was worth it. And sometimes it wasn't. And we're only probably just now getting to the point where there have been enough visualizations and interactive features and things over time.
00:15:50
Speaker
in a single publication with a single set like editorial team to be able to judge whether or not it worked. It was worth it so that you could actually establish guidelines to be consistent about your decision making. Yeah, I mean, there was a time when I was interested in finding the standard data visualization style guides. And it was like amazing to me how hard they were to find.
00:16:10
Speaker
I mean, there are guidelines about what you put in the CMS and guidelines about how you write and how you do a headline and where it's placed on the page. But there was very few guides about what size is the title, what colors do we use for the first three lines, that sort of thing. And I would guess that just like you just said, it's probably even less common to have something for interactives of what their styles and guidelines are.
Need for Editorial Guidelines
00:16:39
Speaker
Yeah and like what are our rules about like do we assume consent do we auto play saying we have buttons and even just like that that obviously touches on so much stuff in terms like. Are the buttons always in the lower left are you have to hover over them to see them like it ripples into lots of decisions but i think a lot of people are really asking those questions yet.
00:17:02
Speaker
No, yeah, and I think that and then there's the question of consistency across the site. If you are, you know, whatever the New York Times and you have the pause button, if that's going to be your rule, does that have to be applied 100% of the time? Or are there are there exceptions to that rule? And how do you make those determinations?
00:17:18
Speaker
Yep. So you've mentioned a couple of things that people can do to avoid the let's not make people get sick in terms of, you know, basically obeying physics, which is kind of just a general good rule of thumb. Yes.
00:17:33
Speaker
You talked about consent, basically play buttons, pause buttons, letting people sort of choose when something is going to happen. What other techniques or strategies can people use when they are trying to think about these sorts of issues? And I would sort of broaden it, not just for people who have
00:17:49
Speaker
you know, sort of like you mentioned, not just medical issues, but or medical concerns, but a broader group of people who just, you know, don't want to be scroll checked and don't want the thing to spin around because it's really, you know, they don't need
Text Alternatives for Accessibility
00:18:02
Speaker
that. They just want to know what is the point of this of this graph of the story.
00:18:06
Speaker
I think a good thing for people to sort of remember is that reading is real big on the web. And there's a reason many of us like things like Pocket and RSS feeds and stuff like that is because they give us a stripped down version of otherwise fancy pages and sites.
00:18:25
Speaker
And so give people that without making them go to a third party service like if you have a really. Fancy interactive interesting version of a story then make sure there's also like a text version that just like doesn't that doesn't try to be interactive and doesn't try to be fancy and moving just alternative especially like.
00:18:46
Speaker
That's a nice thing for people who are feeling sort of neurologically overwhelmed. It's also really important for people who are on like a data capped plan, which in the United States is going to be like, lower income people, people with disabilities, any communities of color, like any of the sort of intersections of those groupings, people who are living in rural areas with crappy
00:19:08
Speaker
cell coverage on indigenous reservations, like all kinds of things that if you are forcing them to download real big pictures and big graphs and auto-playing videos, that's costing them actual dollars on their cell plan, right? There's a literal economic cost to those people. And so giving people an option to just have the words. And if you can't tell the story with just words, I feel like that's a bigger problem to solve.
00:19:36
Speaker
It's great to have visuals as an assist, or if the story can't be told with just words, that feels to me like something that needs to be addressed as sort of a larger approach to your story. Like, what do you need to break down further to make this work as a story?
00:19:55
Speaker
Right. Yeah, I think that's right. A few years ago, I don't know if this one comes up into your list of things that make your head hurt. But the New York Times did the yield curve project a few years ago where it was like this 3D contour map. And I was reading it on my way to work and I was on my phone. And in the New York Times app, it was just, I think, five or six static images.
00:20:19
Speaker
And it was really neat. And the story was really good and it explained it really well, but I couldn't figure out why people were so excited when I'm looking at my Twitter feed. And then when I got to the office and opened up the browser, you were able to move the whole thing around and you know, you could twist and you could turn it. But for me, you know, just having those six static images were the things that really told the story well. And now I feel like now that's probably a couple years ago already.
Consistency Across Devices
00:20:44
Speaker
Now I feel like the ability to have the same project on multiple devices, multiple platforms is that much easier. And yet maybe it's too much flash too much. And that also speaks to me it feels like about the idea that you should make sure that the less interactive versions of your story are not second class citizens.
00:21:07
Speaker
in that it would have been nice for you reading the more static version, which still had a great story. It would have been nice for you to know that there was going to be interactivity if you viewed it on a different device.
00:21:19
Speaker
That sounds a little bit like this best viewed in Netscape Navigator 6, but there's the idea that just because someone's reading the text-only version on their phone doesn't mean that they are completely uninterested in fancier, flashier version that maybe has some video content as well. If you're going to give people a text version, let them know what's different between that version and the other version. Otherwise, they might not be getting all of the
00:21:47
Speaker
information and maybe at some other time they would be interested in it. Yeah, yeah, that's great. I mean, these are all great. So I want to, before we wrap up, I want to ask what else you have to work on. I'm going to guess that writing this piece probably took you a bit of time because a lot of the things that you show are a little flashy and you know, even a little flashy for me.
00:22:09
Speaker
um but i'm curious what other things you have uh what have you know what's funny is that um when i was writing the piece i didn't take those screen captures myself and i wrote to my editors and i was like hey i don't actually know how to do these screen captures do you want me to learn and they were like we'll do it because it would make you sick and so like we'll do the screen captures which and i was like oh that's nice thank you uh and then they wrote me back a couple hours later and they were like that is nice
00:22:33
Speaker
I totally made myself sick. I'm not even a person who's super sensitive to this, but like going back and forth through these scrolls was really, really difficult for me. And I was like, Oh, okay. Yay. Like, um, yeah. So otherwise point to check. Yeah.
Current Projects and Future Work
00:22:49
Speaker
Uh, so yeah, otherwise, um, I'm on Twitter a lot. Uh, I'm a consultant so people can hire me to help them figure out CMS problems and stuff. I'm actually in the midst of writing. It's not quite like a book. It's more like an essay collection, um, about it's a little bit about like being human in a tech world and the teams that we work on and sort of being human and vulnerable and having to deal with our own kind of personal psychologies in team contexts and in product contexts and things like that.
00:23:18
Speaker
Great, great. Well, I'm going to keep my eyes open for that one. And I'll make sure to share, of course, the source article for those who haven't seen it and link to your Twitter feed so people can can follow and watch along and maybe even get back to you about the strategies that they use or maybe fail to use and want to use to enhance their pieces. So Eileen, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Super interesting.
00:23:43
Speaker
And thanks to everyone for tuning in to this week's episode. I hope you learned a lot and may rethink some of the things that you are including in your Data Vis projects. So thanks for tuning into this week's episode. If you have comments or questions or suggestions, please do let me know on the site or on Twitter. So until next time, this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.