I'm sorry you feel that way. As a Forbes developer, I can tell you we are trying to make the site as usable as possible. If you have any specific feedback I can pass along drop me an email at buley.reports at gmail
Summarize in as few as pages possible - the less clicks needed the better. Not sure how well that works with the management since they are probably interested more in pageviews than anything else, but it would be a start. Second, the information in this "article" was factual, not pictorial, so why was it in a slideshow? The pictures are second to the numbers - they certainly aid in telling the story, but they aren't THE story.
I don't care so much about the all in one page, but having to roll over the image to see the text was too difficult. Took me a minute just to figure it out. Have the text below the image without having to roll over it. I also had trouble figuring out at the opening shot where to click. Took me forever to find the next button, I found it just in time. I almost left!
Check out the design books:
The Design of Every Day things
Designing the Obvious
Information Dashboard Design
You have a whole heap of space, why would you overlay the text over the image, it also feels like their is more advertising space than content space.
An ideal layout would be all one page, it would have the text nicely under or around the images. Even if the ad in the top and side bars was still there at least they wouldn't seem like the most prominent thing on the page.
The NYTimes does all this quiet well, they page but at least their pages are quiet long. They may even have the same amount of ads on the page but the content is so much more dense that it doesn't feel spammy.
We've still got plenty of room for improvement, clearly, but the editorial team just recently introduced a new version of the gallery slides that get us a bit closer to what you're describing: http://blogs.forbes.com/bruceupbin/2010/12/08/spacex-gets-ku...
I think the "all one page" idea is a good one, and I'll talk to the right folks about it. My only concern is that such a media-heavy page is going to be pretty rough in terms of page speed.
Yes, that's a gallery where the text is not overlaid on the photo, and the Google ads are not quite as tacky, but I think this is missing the point: the content in the OP doesn't belong in a photo gallery format at all.
Notice how many points the posts summarizing the article received - NOBODY to whom you actually want to advertise has any desire to sit around clicking through a gallery to read text.
Yes, your single page load speed may be good, but imagine how much slower your total gallery experience is. You can always have a load more content on scroll if it's really a problem.
EVERYONE feels that way. I don't bother sending around Forbes links anymore because they require so many clicks. One piece of advice - make a printable page that way we don't have to click so many times
I certainly agree. The real problem is what mandatory interstitials (not in this case, I see), AdSense boxes next to content and tiny amounts of content per page do to a site. They exude an aura closer to desperation than success. I'm guessing Forbes readers can pick up on that better than most.
I know internet publishing is a tough business, but we all know there's a problem here.
