EP Writing for Interactive Media Forum

The most user-hostile MS web site...with a good pitch outline

Here's a perfect example of a truly horrible web site from a big company with a fancy design agency.

Microsoft Multimedia Productions (M3P) is a division of Microsoft that's trying to get creative people who are not necessarily web savvy to come up with good new multimedia ideas.

The interesting and useful part for writers is the Microsoft Multimedia Pitch Document, a good outline for making multimedia proposals. For intellectual property buyers, there's also a Microsoft Non-Disclosure Agreement to protect you (and them) from ownership conflicts.

But the site itself, designed by Broadway Interactive Group in New York, is appallingly user-abusive.

1. You can't read it at all without downloading and installing Macromedia's Flash plug-in, a 151K plug-in that loads automatically into Microsoft's Internet Explorer but that is not so easy to install with other browsers like Netscape 2.0
2. Once you spend the 5 to 10 minutes to install the plug-in, you get a typical early 80s-style CD-ROM treatment. Splash screens of slow artwork lumber by with very little information and lots of waiting time, even on our 128K ISDN line. It took 2-1/2 minutes to flip three or four screens of fluff text and chug through a spinning logo.
3. Not only is it slow, it has no interactivity. For most of the pages, all you can click is the old fashioned "Next" button to take you to the following text page.
4. And because it's a Flash document and not an HTML page, you get no feedback or download heartbeat to tell whether you're frozen up or not. You're locked into a very narrow data stream with little visual or editorial payoff.
5. Worst of all, it doesn't work. Clicking on what looks like a link to the pitch document pops you out to a closing page of contact data. I couldn't access the pages listed above through the Flash plug-in; I had to boot an ancient web browser that didn't process Java or Flash to get to the raw site. (With all these new plug-ins and applets on the web, it's a good idea to keep an old copy of Mosaic or WebSurfer around; many mulimedia hotshots never bother to debug the code they're zapping to your desktop.)
6. If your intention is to reach unwired creative people new to multimedia, this seems like exactly the wrong way to go about it. The only people who would put up with such user-antagonistic nonsense are people like me who use it as an example of what not to do in multimedia.

Remember, "re-purposing" is not a real word.