Posted by jake in 
Stroke of Genius: Make Use of Your Medium
The BBC History site is an excellent place to learn about WWI and WWII. Among the many great resources are a set of animated maps covering things like the fall of France during WWII, the landings on D-Day,and the Western Front from 1914-1918 (screenshot below).
A static screenshot doesn’t do this tool justice. As you play it, the map pans and zooms to follow the action, it shows troop movements and major offensives, and it redraws the front line with each major battle. Why does all this come across so well? Because the creators of this tool made good trade-offs given that their medium was the web.
Here’s a quick comparison of 3 different mediums:
| Resolution |
Portability |
Dynamism |
Interactivity |
User context |
|
| Books |
High | High | Low | Low | Tell me a story |
| Television |
Low | Low | High | Low | Entertain me |
| Web sites |
Medium | Medium | High | High | Let me find exactly what I want |
So if the author were trying to find the right map for a book, they might choose a static but high-resolution, highly detailed one like this WWI map (3.4 MB). For television, they might choose to animate the map and include voice-overs that tell one specific story-line, but would avoid text as much as possible.
Since in our case, the medium is the web, the author chose a fairly low-resolution map, animated it, including pans and zooms to get more detail when needed (overcoming some of the resolution limitations of the web), included text (because web surfers typically prefer to read rather than listen), and made it interactive (to allow users to follow along at their own pace, taking advantage of one of the key benefits of web content). Had the author put up a large static map, or an animated, non-interactive movie, it wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.
If anything, the map should be more interactive, allowing the user to pan and zoom himself and click on the timeline as an alternate way to jump around the animation. And, even though users’ screens are typically low resolution, if this map scaled with the user’s window, it would allow the lucky folks who have high-resolution monitors to take full advantage of their real estate.
If you think about your medium, you have the chance to turn something good into something great.