Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 Infographics

I'm sure most people can figure out that the top three images are meant to be buttons, but I'll admit that I didn't notice, at first, that when you click each subhed-button, a "Next" option pops up in the top right, along with page-boxes to the top left. It's obvious once you've noticed them, but the trick is noticing them in the first place, which you might not because your eyes immediately jump down to the graphic. How many users, after seeing the initial graphic, immediately click on one of the other subhead buttons, thus seeing only a total of 3 graphics?

An equally problematic issue is that there's no way to deep-link any of the items. I can't easily discuss a specific graphic (and they're hard to locate via rightclicking, as they're embedded via svg tag) here, or even one of the subnav-topics, without fully describing the actual graphic...which is a real inconvenience. The use of clickable gray boxes as pagination only adds to the inconvenience, because now I have to count which box I'm on.

I think this would've been better served by having each sub-topic be a long, scrollable webpage...as it is now, you already have to scroll to read most of these graphics. Once you get done with one graphic, you have to scroll back to the top, click "Next", and then read through...at least have a "Next" at the bottom.

The main argument for having this compact nav is to invite quicker comparison between slides...I don't think that's a great argument even in the best of cases, but here, because of the vertically-long slides, it's not even applicable. It'd be far easier to flip back between sequential graphics by simply scrolling.

OK, that was a lot of nagging, but I hate to see great work obfuscated by "gee-whiz" navigational design that is user-unfriendly. I would discuss the graphics but like I said, it's kind of a pain to specify and describe each particular slide without deeplinks.

This presentation may have good design within it, but it is not actually presented well. It is intended to be a series of slides which appear on single screens. However between its thick header and insanely thick header, there is not enough real estate on the screen to view a full slide on my 13" MacBook Pro. So I have to scroll down to view the bottom of the slide, then scroll up again to click the navigation element, then scroll down again to view the full slide, etc. It's incredibly aggravating.

So I've just hacked the CSS to set the header and footer to display:none. Not an auspicious way to begin an interaction!

On the presentation, it does feel like a stew with all the right ingredients but without seasoning to fully appreciate the taste. Seasoning not meaning editorial content, but a glue to hold the how and why together, and understand the combination of the taste.

I disagree with complements on the look of this. I kind of feel it's misisng something, which i can't quite pin down. perhaps it's the look of the maps, that they don't quite match the rest of the feel. The sources text in FF28 W7x64 doesn't look particuarly good, not very ledgible.

maybe it's just an overall static and clinical look that i don't quite like (which is odd as i do like industrial design).

I think it possibly needs a bit more art direction. but i'm a consumer so what do i know.