Forget Lovemarks and Storytelling.
When you’re advertising online you need to FLINK! again.
The print barons are not the only ones to have struggled with the paradox of web (e)publishing. Advertising professionals are also struggling to come to terms with the internet’s ability to generate unlimited performance metrics and the apparent differences in the way audiences read printed and electronic pages.
The simple fact is the average visitor to your web site just doesn’t see the ads on the page. They are to busy looking for the next hyperlink.
It is what I call FLINK!
FLINK is a phrase that describes how we scan a web page in an “F” direction looking for the hyperlink to take us to the next step on our online quest.
The web useability guru, Jakob Nielsen is well know in GUI Designer circles for his studies on eyetracking and Banner Blindness.
If you take the time to review his work you will begin to understand why a lot of web advertising does not work. You may also begin to question why you have spent so much money hiring a designer to produce those pretty web page graphics – but that’s another story.
When I first encountered multimedia (almost 20 years ago) I was also engaged in the process of writing a media studies manual for use in Australian Universities. The bulk of the manual dealt with Film and TV but I could see Computer Games, Animation and Graphics were growing in appeal. Particularly with the more innovative students. So I included some notes on what I thought the challenges would be designers of interactive media.
Here is an extract from the book. It illustrates my initial thoughts on the problems facing the Advertising industry today.
All media, by the nature of the relationship between author and audience, is interactive. We can say this because all media is subject to choice. As an audience you make certain decisions and actions which lead you to an involvement with both medium and message. You switch on the TV or open a letter It is your choice, however whimsical or passive, to do so. This is interactivity at its most basic level. The freedom to choose and distinguish between media and message.
The call to do (action), to implement, to solve is at the heart of the interactive medium.
This means that the packaging or authoring of the interactive message is determined by this call to action rather than by the need to direct the audience towards a specific, preconceived conclusion.
With interactive media the quality of the authoring is not gauged by the ability to distill the vast array of information available at any one time into a digestible, entertaining package, but by the author’s ability to create activities which require the audience to encounter an array of information and then act upon it. So where the modern notion of authoring is about closing down the audience’s potential access to information and events, so that the final message is uncluttered with irrelevancies, the interactive author must be focused upon developing rewarding activities with in which the message can be contained and allowed to germinate through the audience’s involvement with the medium.
The message structure of interactive media is clearly distinguished by;
- A lack of structure in the narrative and space/time continuum
- A wealth of subset plots, discrete units/models of information and activities.
- An operational platform by which the audience can source these discrete units, plots and activities.
Accordingly interactive media can be labelled patterning media. The great asset of the medium is the options available to the audience. Options which are readily available throughout the duration of the message transfer.
This means the audience is no longer controlled by the author’s sense of destiny.
Consequently the approach to authoring in this medium is to map the content of a program in much the same way as one tiles together a family tree. We begin with a start point and then compound the “random” path by a factor each time we “interact” with the audience. The net result is the author becomes engrossed in the permutations available through the medium rather than the relationship between audience and message.
The true “hook” of any interactive program is in fact the process (the activity) which the audience is asked to accomplish with the interactive tools you provide.
The art of authoring for interactive media is centred on developing activities which will keep the audience involved with the message.
Interactive authoring must be result centred, it is about what can we offer the audience to make them feel good about being involved with the medium.
As we have subsequently discovered. Interactive media is not about constructing messages (ie the traditional media and now mainstream online publishing model) but about providing people with the platform and the tools to
a. discover new worlds
b. to share these new worlds with others
c. to express themselves by creating their own (new) world
(i.e. Facebook, Myspace, WordPress etc)
August 16th, 2011 → 11:07 pm
[...] on the subject of UX Design (e.g. Banner Blindness and the use of Eye Tracking in UI design). (see FLINK and they’re gone!) Earlier today I stumbled across this 1997 study he conducted of the Sun Newspaper’s online [...]