How to make your websites more immersive: 5 pro tips

A place where you can potentially EXPERIENCE, EXPLORE and GET INSPIRED by content from around the world. Failing to inspire
Could it be due to the fall of Flash? But in reality the memory of those constraints will fade away quickly while the project will still be around. Don’t waste your time
A happy note to boost your stamina level… Startup sites, banks, and even iPhone apps promo sites can tell a story as well. 02. It’s our responsability to keep it that way. Brilliantly executed ‘interactive experiences’ that lack a story are a waste of time. I don’t often feel rewarded by any of these sites, they all over promise and fail later on. Your work will be processed by the audience like part of that mainstream trend, and its message will be ignored. So think about it like two sides of the same coin. An immersive experience ends up being a video played full screen or a bunch of 3D models and hotspots to ‘learn more’ and the broad act of ‘exploring’ ends up meaning scrolling down through a long page while playing a video in slow mo or seeing a grid of pictures. Constraints are normally misused as an excuse for an average work performance. Claudio’s personal projects vary from mobile apps and games to teaching courses online and speaking at Design Conferences around the world. The current mainstream design trend? Side-scrolling Japanese beat-em-up Final Fight was a SNES favouriteThroughout the years working in the interactive industry, I have felt that same excitement several times; when checking out some of the so called ‘interactive experiences’, checking regular content sites and lately playing GTAV online. Most of the people will jump up on their seats: «We can’t do a game!»
Surprisingly, whether you call it a game or something else, the reality is that the gamification processes are actually pretty useful when it comes to engaging users. 05. We still continue overusing all these meaningless call to actions and vague promises but more and more they are losing their significance and killing my expectations. In a few words, be disruptive, trends will make you normal and forgettable. Take the chance to impact users in one way or another. Or the fact that Chrome Experiments are just that: experiments? However these are the limitations that should push your work even further. 03. 01. Many ‘interactive music videos’ end up being a video with no story where you move your mouse to see a flashy effect. So now think for a second and try to answer this…
When was the last time you felt immersed in an online experience? Engage them through interactions, make them part of the ‘experience’, play with their expectations and surprise them after all. Low budgets, limited time, limited resources or client vision can make you give up sooner than later and become a Zombie Designer that only follows orders. I was 12 years old when I played an arcade game for the first time. Don’t ever miss the chance to make a great project, for you and for your users. Take this article as a few of many learnings. Words: Claudio Guglieri
Claudio Guglieri has been responsible for leading and crafting interactive experiences for clients like Google, EA, CNN, Nickelodeon, History Channel, Range Rover, Microsoft and Motorola. I don’t want to spend time in your ‘immersive experience’ and, unless you give me something truly awesome, I won’t share your content. Agency websites, police departments and fashion portals adopted this trend blindly. Ask yourself, what do you want users to feel when checking out your site? The increasingly tight budgets? The internet has been an amazing place from its beginning. I remember like it was yesterday the rush I felt when the music started and when the story kicked off. If so, please do let us know in the comments. I barely played for five minutes but when I finished I was so excited I could feel my heart beating in my throat. Following trends can kill your message
No one’s going to look at your website if it just looks like a copy of someone else’sHave you realized how many websites look similar these days? However as time goes by I realized my expectations in the interactive field are getting lower and lower. While trends will keep you up with the mass of sites being produced out there, it will also kill your message and will distract the user from its real purpose. If your work is not perceived as engaging because of its content, how this content is treated, or its functionality and how this is displayed, that’s a failure. iPhone App promo sites are so similar that you can even download templates to do your own with few assets. Make it interactive
What’s the point of being on the web if you don’t take full advantage of its interactivity?The internet is interactive. At other times ,a sad dream will make me feel blue in the mornings. Great sites that ‘wow’ me recently are Lifesaver: A Revolutionary New Way To Learn CPR by Unit9 and USA Today by F-i. Since the death of Flash the whole industry has taken a step back. First I’ll state the obvious, we all want our work to be successful, to be liked by users. Something that doesn’t add value to your career, isn’t it a waste of time? The ideation of your work should come from the message you want to communicate instead of from the current trend in the industry. Considering we work on an interactive platform it should be even easier to get the user involved in a story. Thinking about the amount of websites a normal user sees everyday online, we don’t really have much of a chance to make a huge impact on those users. Have you had an immersive experience online? The spread of parallax, long scrolling, grids or one pagers promo sites? And now create a narration around that. I’ve reread paragraphs in books that made me feel great all of a sudden, full of energy. We need to make sure we have a story to tell. Never underestimate the power of a good story
Everyone and every brand has a story to tell — so tell itPersonally, I have experienced every kind of emotion while reading books or watching movies. And secondly, being a bit selfish now, how would you feel knowing you spent X weeks working on something that doesn’t work? It was the ’90s and the game was Capcom Arcade’s Final Fight. With their limited attention span they will probably scan our site and engage only if either its content and or functionality is perceived as useful for them. As part of a digital agency I try to fix this as much as I can. Final Fight was a hell of an experience.