This is the reason I had to stop playing EVE Online. I love the premise and universe of the game, but my goodness does it start to feel like a "job" quickly.
"....I have to work with a customer support rep to get it issued"
I'm finding more and more (or maybe it's always been this way?) that the onus for correcting or making sure something is correct, is ALWAYS placed on the last person in the chain.....the individual.
This is especially true for medical and insurance problems. You don't pay the individual/customer, and you have no incentive to help them (other than they might go somewhere else a little less bad). For people that haven't had to go through this yet, such as a claim gone wrong, everything seems fine. One example of this has been life insurance companies verifying eligibility only after the person has died and someone has made a claim. It seems part of the business model to make life so miserable for customers that they give up trying to get what they were promised.
I'm going to have to disagree with many of the other comments and say that this is a very well designed website. In my opinion, it's the optimal way to present this data in an interactive format short of a presentation from someone in the same room. Large amounts of geographic data that covers as large an area as the search for MH370 did, is not easy to present.
As a user here’s my main gripes when comparing the two UIs :
- The map in tympanus is in svg. Lighter, see how the interaction is always in sync with the user interaction ? Why using tilze at maps if you can’t zoom ? You’re lazy loading but I’m not lazy reading.
- The text flows naturally : you need to choose either you build a powerpoint with bullets either you write more elaborate content. This UI is more appropriate to bullets but is displayed with a powerpoint type UI because of …
- Scroll hijacking : everyone not working in a webagency hates it. Even your boss who tells you that (s)he finds it cool hates it when they need to use it.
…And the stock video of water isn’t bringing much (but that’s another debate)
The only good piece of news is that the UI seems to be open-source (though bound to external services) so if you want to punish your users or improve the whole thing :
https://github.com/Esri/story-map-cascade
But as I’ve also said earlier people died in this crash and families are still looking for explanations and I don’t find this way to narrate the events appropriate. Maybe I’m old school and should just say to my relatives : If I die in a tragic fashion please don’t let any webagency and government agency do parrallaxes on the circumstances of my death and its side effects
I don't have a background in webdesign so I cannot speak to the inefficiencies of how this is put together. I do, however, have a background in GIS/Geography and from that perspective I still maintain that this is a great way to present the timeline of events and information gathered. It's an especially great way to present the data for a layperson who
A) has a passing interest in geographic/oceanic/general data topics and
B) doesn't really care how efficient the UI is because they don't live in that world on a daily basis
That said, I also have the opinion that not all websites HAVE to be optimized for mobile viewing. There are instances, such as this one, where the data/information being communicated does not lend itself to mobile and therefore should not be compromised.
To your last point, I think I understand the direction you're coming from, but I have to disagree with the final argument you make. Just because a lot of people died in a tragic accident doesn't mean that we cannot celebrate and utilize information that is a direct result of that tragedy.
The designers of the linked site are not celebrating the deaths of these people, they're sharing and marveling in the data that was produced as an unexpected secondary and tertiary result of those deaths. One does not preclude the other and, I would argue, it would be a disservice those who died to NOT share and learn from the data produced.
Do you honestly think (and buy the stereotype) that people from Arkansas are a bunch of inbred, shoeless, hillbillies? If so, how do you explain the size and success of Wal Mart so far? Do you really think that Wal Mart is delivering products to over 10,000 of stores worldwide without an understanding of SQL?
Wal Mart is doing some pretty cool stuff with technology. Maybe not on the level of Amazon, which might end up biting them in the long run, but Wal Mart definitely knows their way around a database.
To answer your first question, I'm from Fort Worth and yes; not exactly that stereotype though. The difference runs really, really deep. I interviewed with them once as well.
Some people at wal mart know their way around a database (database being euphemism for a broader "tech culture"), they are not well represented in management and wal mart is trying to change that (with jet acquisition). but too little too late.
Conservatives are not aware of techie condescension (0 effect in most of these peoples daily lives, really sort of an arrogance to even think that) nearly as much as the liberal tendency to try to skirt around hard truths, to censor.
Imagine a wife/girlfriend who is PISSED because you won't get into a heated argument, you just stay all cool and level headed, hedging statements and whatnot.
