Item — HN Reader

No. Just no.

The BBC has just started doing this / something similar with their royal wedding coverage* and I found it incredibly irritating. No longer can you scan an article, but instead have to traverse a choose-your-own-adventure style chatbot to get the information you’re used to simply scanning the article for. I probably also especially despised it because the journalism on these new segments seems to be overly poppy/gossipy (an attempt to fit to the chat format, I guess).

Perhaps I’m in a minority of users here, as a developer who can see past the UI gimmick. Emulating one of the most pervasive UI/UX paradigms (mobile chat) could prove useful and refreshing to the majority of readers. I’m just not sold yet.

I feel a more solid approach — if publishers really want to make their written content more interactive — would be to organise the information from an interview / article into topics that can be dived-into via a visual hierarchy of information.

*Can’t load a reference on mobile browser.

The BBC's experiment, from what I can tell, has left the format of the core story untouched. All the chatbot' does is tinker with the format of what would traditonally be 'box-outs' in print journalism or possiboly 'related story' content.

As an ex-journalist, if feels like a valuable way of letting a journalist use the additional research information that has been gathered, but doesn't easily fit into the structure of the story and which would previously have been left in the journalist's note book.