An online, fully interactive funk film, authored in MX

[zarinmedia]

http://www.slimjackson.com

The "who's your daddy", of interactive online films.

Our hero, Slim Jackson, show's us how to keep it real, and kick it, when sh** needs kickin.

When trouble happens, the user is on the down low while deciding how to take it to the man.

Ain't nobody got nothin on Slim. You Dig!

[retrocool]

Umm.. how can I put this?
I use a 64k ISDN dial-up. This movie completely swamped my connection. Several multimegabyte files were loading at once.
When I got the loading man telling me to please wait, there was no indication of how long I might be expected to wait. After about 5 minutes, I started clicking on the 'navigation tab', just to keep myself from going insane.
A big mistake. The navigation pane is utterly nonsensical. Unless you made the movie, or have already watched it, you can have no idea what it represents.
I had to reload the movie several times, and quit my browser once.
You need either to:
a/ Warn users that this is ONLY for broadband or
b/ Distribute on CD-ROM
OR
c/ Load movies in a more linear fashion
d/ add captions to the nav
e/ give users some indication of how long they are to wait- ie a load bar
f/ fix your loading screen so that it actually starts playing the movie when it has loaded - I had to reload the whole page every time I met the dancing dude - he never gave me the next page.

The CONTENT is ****ing great 'tho. I love the actual movie.

I hope this helps, 'cos you've got a great movie there!

retrocool

[zarinmedia]

Hi Retro Cool,

Thanks for your detailed report, no doubt you had a negative experience.

The info you provided was very useful though, thanks for participating.

I will look at all of your comments and see how I can make the loading better.

cheers and keep on flashin

Ru

ps, feel free to shoot the movie around to your friends. To see how they fair.

[retrocool]

The experience was not *all* negative. I can tell you've got some great content there. It was a little frustrating not being able to get at it!

Another quick suggestion - once a scene has started to play could you add a fast forward button (or full VCR controls) to skip bits already seen? This might only apply to me 'cos my continuing efforts to view the movies meant I had to sit through some of them several times.

Perhaps you could give users a choice of broadband / narrowband (BB/NB) at the start and offer different streaming solutions for each. Your solution may well already work for BB users. NB users are used to having to wait a bit :)
For NB users a good streaming policy is to only load one movie at a time, to show loading progress and even to offer something to do while loading happens (the dancing pimp is a good start). And when the movie is ready to play, offer a 'play' button rather than starting automatically. That way users can go do something else while the movie downloads.

Good luck, hipster :)

retrocool

[zarinmedia]

Thanks,you rock!

if you like, shoot me an email and I'll put you on the slimjackson mailing list. You can keep up with any future episodes, and I also plan to put up some of the older ones too.

subscribe@slimjackson.com

r.