Chapter 6. Writing Nonlinear, Interactive Stories

The interactions built into your Web content can offer your readers a fantastic, custom journey on the Web. Interactive links can provide a pleasurable trip to meaningful information with satisfying speed and agility. On the flip side, some interactivity can leave readers feeling bored, frustrated, distrustful, overwhelmed, and exhausted. To provide the pleasurable ride, you’ll need to work as an author and a designer as you develop content. You’ll need to understand your readers, how they hunt for information, and what their needs and expectations are. Your readers won’t be aware of how hard you’ve worked to get links just right, chunk information, and arrange intuitive navigational paths. That’s good! Readers should click through the interactions without a thought about where the journey began, where they’ve been, or how they arrived at the final destination.