I chose to analyze the project Blood Sugar. The project uses mainly audio and an interactive interface to tell the stories of several drug addicts who use needles. Overall I really thought this project was interesting and benefited from the audio interviews. However initially navigating the site was difficult. I do not think that this site it easily understandable if you do not know what you are about to look at and why. After initially launching the site, I had to go back to the about page on the vectors website to figure out what I was looking at. Basically at the heart of the site is a visual presentation of the audio interviews of addicts. The site tells the stories of 13 users. The visuals relate to what I assume to be hear rates.
The main problem with the site is that while the audio plays there are moving animations that can be interacted with, but I’m not sure what all of them do and at times they distract from the interviews of the addicts. The interviews themselves are very captivating, and I think necessary to achieving the project’s goal of moving away from more subjective accounts of addiction and needle use. I think the creators chose to make the site interactive, to emphasize certain economic, gender, geographic points that should be considered for context in addiction. I also think they chose the animations because an artistic perspective was mentioned multiple times in the Vector about page. One of my favorite parts of this site was the terms section that could prove useful for an audience looking to educate themselves in this subject matter. I also noticed that the website has a section of what can be done about this issue, which definitely distances itself from stricter more journalistic uses of interviews. I also liked the inclusion of transcripts for the interviews just in case I did not catch everything.
This project was a very interesting example of an overall successful use of multimedia in storytelling. I do think that the animations can be streamlined and the navigation could be more user friendly, without the need of a “help” section of the website.