It’s time for immersive brand experiences
How brands are blending digital & physical experiences
Digital is no longer the center piece of brand experience. Screen-based interactions are evolving into connected experiences throughout our everyday lives and successful products such as Google home or the Amazon Echo have shown us that brands are now able to create experiences in a new space of physical and sensory experiences.
Screens have always been limiting. They have enabled us to be connected to the world. Anyone and everything at the touch of a finger but all through the narrow scope of your screen. When the internet of things started to become more and more popular screens became the main touchpoint for any connected experience.
With screens as the main digital touch point of a product, we naturally tend to focus us on the experience of the device rather than the person themselves. Yes, the experience can be pleasant but these are often static experiences that do not have considerable outcomes.
The future of service design should be focused on combining physical and digital touch points to create immersive experiences.
We have known for a while the future of screen design would be a complex challenge. Yet it is not complex in a way that we are unprepared but complex in a way that when physical experiences start to blend with the digital we are only limited by our imagination of what immersive experience we could create.
By allowing ourselves to place more emphasis on the physcial experience of the digital product or service we find ourselves engaging with an opportunity to create more than just a sensory experience. The technology has been around for a while but it has not been until now that all of the technology required to do so has been widely accepted and integrated by users.
(ty google, ty amazon, etc)
The most common examples of brands starting to combine physical and digital experiences are in immersive experiences that are designed for you to buy into the brands story. Like Microsofts immerive Infinity room above.
Some brands like Apple have connected all of their products to become one. Other brands use your information to predict your movements and decisions to influence you towards their own product but I believe blending these experiences to have even more physcial aspects considered more would make a much bigger difference, luckily that is what’s happening.
how do we design experiences and spaces to connect with people around us, enabled by digital in a physical world? — FJORD
To be truly ready for when designing immersive experiences we should let technology inspire us like this but think beyond. Smart Home products like the Amazon Echo is based on technology that has been around for a while but it has been repackaged and made to suit user needs. If we can use the same vein when we start to shift from purely digital to immersive maybe it will be just as successful.
With this success, I believe that immersive brand design could be a great opportunity for user experience designers. Combining knowledge to integrate digital and physical spaces will provide an exciting challenge that will throw up the need for new and improved capabilities.
It’s all pretty exciting stuff but it has been a long time coming. We have been seeing concepts like this for a while but as FJORD suggest — 2018 will be the year brands get tuely immersive and physical fights back.
