How to use video to enhance user experience
Video is increasingly used on websites to enhance and enrich the user experience. Teenagers and children are particularly plugged in to this medium with Youtube, Facebook and Instagram all very high on the lists of sites most used by the younger generations. Even very young children are weaned onto this medium, often viewing their favourite cartoons, nursery rhymes and songs on tablets or smartphones rather than TV.
Progressive sites have started to use video in more imaginative ways to connect with their customers. The received wisdom now is not to directly reference or promote your products or services but more to build your brand values, ethos, culture into the video content so the user takes out something more than just a product message. This will almost certainly mean a higher degree of creativity, entertainment value and exclusivity to the subject or message to ensure that extra connectivity with the audience. Hopefully it will enable you to associate and identify your organisation and product (and only them) with the particular attribute or quality portrayed. This might be quite a difficult objective to achieve – but when it works it pays off in major ways.
Video doesn’t have to be lengthy to engage the viewer and convey a serious and potent message. More and more thought is being concentrated on video use with results ranging from a six-second response to a tweet to several minutes exploring the social context of abuse and control. Not necessarily topics you would associate with the products in question but powerful demonstrations of intent and integrity. Part of the process here can be about developing a story for your business that is coherent and relevant but also interesting and compelling for the viewer. This could mean finding an aspect of the business that is unusual or intriguing and developing it into a vital and engaging segment using style, atmosphere, colour etc in attractive and memorable ways.
An alternative could be finding a parallel for your product ethos or business culture in a news, current affairs, artistic context and exploring and exploiting the connection in a manner that both entertains and commits people on a personal, social or emotional level with your offer.
Of course video isn’t always the answer and sometimes doesn’t have the effect you might desire. I have sat through thirty-minute sales letter type videos just for the experience and to see what is at the end. It is usually something they have repeated in different forms about a dozen times during the video. I can’t imagine that many people get very much out of this process or buy the product at the end – if they ever get there.
If a video is dry, dull, boring, irrelevant it is not likely to engage or sell your product. Brevity probably helps but a video doesn’t have to be short; the main thing is that it connects and speaks to your target market with language, triggers and images they feel and relate to. So you will need to know and understand your market intimately because you want to connect at an emotional level to be really effective in this medium.
If you are developing video for your site, make sure you optimise its use and effectiveness. Call us free on 0800 0246 247 or drop us an email at hello@ux247.com for advice and information on how best to achieve this.
