
Al Jazeera open-sources InterviewJS, turns interviews into interactive chats - mark-ruwt
https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/tool-for-journalists-interviewjs-for-turning-interviews-into-interactive-chats/s2/a721546/
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philip1209
Direct link: [https://interviewjs.io/](https://interviewjs.io/)

Demo: [https://story.interviewjs.io/sample-
story](https://story.interviewjs.io/sample-story)

Github:
[https://github.com/AJInteractive/InterviewJS](https://github.com/AJInteractive/InterviewJS)

I tried it out, and I was unimpressed. It's a cool experiment and maybe there
are useful applications, but this doesn't feel like the future of journalism
to me.

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asdsa5325
Demo doesn't work for me (Firefox, latest version)

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f2n
Also using Firefox 60, demo is a blank page.

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realusername
Same, looks like their demo does not work.

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solarkraft
Holy crap, that's annoying.

No want.

Try:
[https://story.interviewjs.io/hd3g6tYmzLgfYYUqzaEzFm/](https://story.interviewjs.io/hd3g6tYmzLgfYYUqzaEzFm/)

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cloakandswagger
Agreed, it's really obnoxious. This seems like a project that should've died
in the idea stage.

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tathougies
This seems exceptionally silly to me. When giving an interview, the person
being interviewed expects to have their interview presented in the order the
questions are asked. There's a bunch of context you lose when ignoring the
order. This interface basically amplifies all the problems inherent in
'soundbites' and makes it 1000x worse.

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jsgo
Valid points, but it doesn’t appear like you’re forced to allow scripts out of
sequence. I was using the Obamacare one and everything flowed okay.

Not something I’d leverage per se, but not bad.

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hhw3h
I think this is an extremely interesting interface. Not only for journalist
interviews but for personal brand sites.

Take a look at Adrian Zumbrunnen's personal site:
[https://azumbrunnen.me/](https://azumbrunnen.me/)

(Unfortunately their SSL cert has expired so you have to click "Proceed
Anyway")

It's an embedded chat with Adrian.

I feel like it's an equally valid experience vs. reading their CV and recent
projects. By clicking through the chat I not only learn about the site
author's expertise but also learn a bit about their personality.

I know I'm not really chatting with them but it still feels more personal and
human.

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rmccue
I think Adrian’s site is a better example of how to execute this. The example
interviews offer pretty minimal interaction, it’s not conversational, and
random SoundCloud links are dumped in.

I’d much rather read an interview, because I want to see the whole picture,
whereas a personal site I may only want to see the directly interesting
things.

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hhw3h
Another interesting example I forgot to reference is Typeform's interactive
blog post.

[https://www.typeform.com/blog/human-
experience/cui/](https://www.typeform.com/blog/human-experience/cui/)

The bot experience gives it kind of a rap genius commentary from the original
author. So it almost feels like you're reading the post with the author
present next to you.

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sisk
It’s funny—I love this format for Quartz but don’t like it much here. I think
a small portion of it is some missing animation but the bigger piece in the
chosen content. IMO, it works for Quartz because the format is headline
followed by selecting between more info and next story. The “more info” flow
usually results in 2-4 additional messages about the story, perhaps with one
additional interaction. Quick and easy. A full interview feels like too much
for this format.

Recommend you check out the Quartz app if you think the format could be
interesting.

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CM30
Well, it's an interesting concept I'll give them that. It does what it says it
does, and provides a slightly more interactive layout for an interview.

But at the same time, it's just really not worth using to be honest with you.
I mean, how exactly does this benefit the reader or make the interview more
enjoyable to read?

It doesn't. It breaks without JavaScript, it takes forever for you to read the
whole interview and it breaks tons of simple browser functionality aspects
like being able to search the page or jump to a specific question easily. It's
like the people who created it made it not because it improved the user
experience, but because they wanted to be different for the sake of being
different.

Yeah, I think I'll stick to the traditional text interview format with all the
questions and answers on one page thank you very much. At least those (like
the ones on my own site) don't break the browser and let users get to the
bloody point.

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sarreph
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.

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Angostura
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.

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andyonthewings
Could be a pretty useful tool for creating a text-based game with multiple
plot lines :)

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take_5
It looks like an existing interview transformed into a non-live interactive
chat where you are given preselected questions to choose from.

I didn't understand that from their write up. Am I missing something?

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sheeshkebab
It’s a great react/aws project - composer ui, react code, content format (for
fun chat bot like scripts).

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JoshMnem
Trying to read while the page is animating is really distracting. I would
close it without reading.

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gboudrias
Twitch plays interviews?

