Top Secret America

mahiskali writes "The Washington Post published an immense interactive website today, detailing the companies and government agencies currently doing top secret work in the United States. Everything from counter-IED operations to human intelligence is touched upon. Citing various interviews with 'super users' and through exhaustive analysis of public records for over two years, this interactive site allows users to peer into the guarded world of top secret intelligence. With more than 854,000 people currently holding a TS clearance, has the defense and intelligence world grown too big, too fast? Or has this large growth served us well, exemplified by no successful terrorist acts on US soil since 9/11? How can we judge the success of these programs, when much of it will never be known by the general public?"

Comments

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in the Post's RIA

[davide marney]

The Washington Post decided to create an entire web site to publish all of the information in this expose. Beyond the usual articles, the site includes interactive maps, interactive infographics, a search engine and an online database. All of this material is delivered via a Flash-based applet, and serves as a good, real-world example of what a rich internet client can do when there is a lot of data to be conveyed, and not just multimedia.

Herewith The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

The Good
The articles are properly paginated for the screen, which makes reading online so very much easier. Each page spans two columns, which are fitted in about 600px of vertical space, which eliminates the need for scroll bars. The sides of the columns have click regions to navigate forward and back through the poages, like on a mobile reader. Perfect.

The interactive maps and infographics are very polished, but not as useful as they could be. As Prof. Tufte taught us, every graphic is supposed to make a point and tell a story. The purpose of these graphics seem to be to help us visually sort the data. While sorting is useful, it's not really telling a story; I think they could have done better. A key point in the article, for example, was that no one really knows who's doing what, and there are surely massive areas of overlap. It'd be nice to have an infographic that really made that point in a visual way.

The Bad
For some reason, many Flash developers insist on messing about with utterly standardized widgets such as the scroll bar. In this case, the UI designers chose to use a middling-grey rectangle for the scrollbar pointer, and a lighter-middling-grey line for the scrollbar background; very difficult to see, much less to click upon. Worse yet, the standard scrollbar behaviors were not supported, and the Page Down/Page Up keys were not active. The upshot is that one has to click and drag the small scrollbar pointer up and down just to move the page. Bad designer! Bad!

The Ugly
There are no words that can convey the ugliness that is the Comments interface. A complete UI failure. See it for yourself at
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/COMMENTSLINK

All in all, I think the Washington Post deserves an A+ for effort, and a B for execution. The only really sour note is the Comments interface. But delivering the entire expose as a web site shows just how fast and how far the Post has gone towards leveraging the web as an information resource.