Tuesday, 11 August 2009
How do we want our content served up?
Sepas' link to Toriseye and a chat that I had with Liz yesterday has made me think about content, and the way we serve it up. Some of the sites I like best use an interface which is quite childlike - and therefore charming. Little birds dropping you information is hardly sophisticated - but very addictive. Do we consider 'charm' as an element of user experience? Should we try and be more childish to get to a better end result?
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2 comments:
Is there a direct link between 'childish' and 'charming'? And isn't there a mile of water between 'childish' and 'childlike'?
If you can compel someone to interact through the sheer pleasure of the act itself - and I'm thinking about the relatively early days of seeing Flash animations 'responding' to your click as well as more sophisticated experiences - that can be seen as a positive thing. Time spent with brand and on page all make for good stats to show to the client.
Then there's the argument that the immersiveness of the experience may become the point for the user. It's all very well to find Sprint's Next application compelling for the casual browser, but do you walk away with any sense of how Sprint are contributing to it or, indeed, why you should consider Sprint as a brand you'd like to invest your hard-earned in?
And then yet again, there's the relevance of the subject matter. I seem to remember that Cadbury's Schweppes old corporate site - the holding company's, not the brand's - had a sort of crayon look and feel to it. And, weirdly, it worked, because you didn't look askance at a purveyor of chocolate bars giving itself childlike airs.
Charm is relative. You can charm with a slinky futuristic interface just as well as you can with cutesy birds. And you might be able to get away with childlike if your brand has, say, a sense of wonder at the world. Ask Honda.
I think you’ve raised a very good point there, regarding how we would like our content served up. But I think a more important and fundamental issue is with the content itself.
Over the last hundred years or so, the film studios, television companies and advertising agencies have employed the very best talent to create and produce their content, so much of it now being central to the world-wide human experience. These institutions have always attracted the dreamers, the art-school drop-outs, the alcoholics and drug addicts, the manic depressives and eccentrics, the artists and the ego-maniacs, and it’s because of this that they’ve turned out such fabulous cultural land-marks.
To engage, entertain and even enchant, you need content that will engage, entertain and even enchant, not just the opportunity to ‘interact’ with something, or ‘click on’ something else.
Until the internet can attract the aforementioned kind of people to its door in droves, and not just those who get off on technology, it will possibly remain what it is now: a valuable tool to help gentlemen find relief, and a fantastic place to buy books and cheap car insurance.
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