I developed this interactive map for American Public Media’s special series on oil production in the world. From their site: “On the one-year anniversary of the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we take a look at the future of crude as we enter an era of ‘tough oil.’ This interactive map – and our coverage below – examines how world crude oil production has shifted over the years, particularly from 1960 to 2010, as oil producers search for new locations and methods for extracting oil.” View on Marketplace

American Public Media needed an interactive piece for a special series on China’s economy which displayed photos, videos and audio. I developed this piece, which allows users to interact with the postcards by pulling them from the back of the stack and flipping them over to read about each one. The video and audio tabs give the user a wide snapshot of media from the series. View on Marketplace »

Interactive television interfaces have been around for a while, think old school cable boxes that allowed you to view a menu of currently playing TV shows. Not much going on there, just a simple list, easy to navigate using your remote. Game consoles have been around for decades, which emphasized animation, color and yet still were simple (think press “A” to start, “B” to change your characters). Then came along the Tivo, Microsoft’s Media Center, and other DVR systems. These all focus on content: live TV, recorded TV, and purchased media. Tivo’s menus are similar to the old cable box menus. Simple text lists with arrows to move deeper into the menus to view details. Windows Media Center does have an interesting 3-D menu design, but as I recall attempting to use it a few years ago, I found it very confusing to jump around between recorded and upcoming and live TV.

Sony, Sharp, Samsung, and Visio have had their own proprietary networked systems embedded in their higher end televisions for the last two years or so, including some with Yahoo!TV Widgets, and now AppleTV and GoogleTV have jumped into the game, Apple with their hardware running on their own platform, and GoogleTV, which rather then a piece of hardware is a platform to be run on set top boxes or embedded in TVs themselves.

So what exactly are these systems supposed to do? Do we expect them to large monitors to our PCs? Do we expect them to be DVRs with large simple interfaces and limited choices? That’s just it, no one is really sure quite what to expect.

And that’s what’s really exciting.

So far, most of the interfaces all seem to have a few things in common: sweeping, often chunky gradients due to the size and resolutions of the televisions, large, simple buttons, and static pages. They seem to have much more in common with mobile applications than websites targeted for computers, which makes some sense, given that until very, very recently, the processing power in the televisions has been pretty much null.

But now the possibilities are exploding, and these static interfaces must go. TV is not meant to be static, users expect motion, color; they want to be carried away, not fumble around with the remote, trying to figure out what to do, no matter how simple and stupid the pages are. Maybe it’s time we stop thinking of them as “pages” and more like, dare I say it, interactive experiences? Sorry, I shudder at that phrase as well. To me, a screen of content on my TV just looks wrong when it’s completely still; I expect AfterEffects, not HTML.

TV designers emphasize the “lean back” experience. For instance, YouTube Leanback just starts auto playing videos for you without any interaction at all (which I’m not sure is the best experience, but one way to take it). The point is that users have no idea what to expect from all these new devices and platforms, but they do know what they want from their TV. And that is to sit back, relax, and be entertained with the touch of a remote.