The Future Of Mobile Web Design: Video Game Design And Storytelling
As attention spans shorten and visitors just want to get to the good stuff on a website, designers have to get more creative in how they communicate their website’s “story.”
What is truly impressive, however, is how we are now able to use design to tell a story. In other words, we no longer need to use long scrolls to set up plots or describe what a company does. This is especially great when designing for the mobile experience, which already sets pretty strict limits on how much we can “tell” versus “show.”
Three Video Game Storytelling Techniques We Need More Of In Web Design
1. Make Your Visitor the Hero
Create User Personas
Develop user personas before you do anything else when strategizing and planning for a website. Your personas should have a key “problem” they face.
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Use Relatable Content
In video game design, there is something known as “ludonarrative dissonance.”
the unpleasant situation where we’re asking players to do something they don’t want to do… or prevent them from doing what they want.
The brain digests visual content 60% more quickly than written content, so your web designs and other visuals (like video, animation, and so on) are the keys to doing this.
The Airbnb blog always does a great job of this type of visual storytelling.
2. Minimize Distractions by Using Symbols
As of August 2017, 52.64% of all visits to websites were done via a smartphone. And, starting in 2017, the most popular size for a smartphonewas between five and six inches and will only continue to grow in popularity as the years go on.
That’s not a lot of space to fill with content for the majority of site visitors, is it?
Functional minimalism is already something you’re doing in your own web design efforts, but have you thought about how it can tie into the storytelling aspect as well?
Here are some ways in which you might use symbols to declutter your site:
Hamburger icon (for the navigation)
Profile photo icon (for account details)
Pencil icon (for an editing interface)
Gear icon (for settings)
Shopping cart icon (to checkout)
Magnifying glass (to expand the search bar)
Connector icon (to open social sharing and RSS feed options)
Question mark (to expand live chat, search, or help options)
And so on.
3. Be Smart About How You Use Space
Use a Spotlight
In video games, you can use light and darkness to draw attention to important pathways. On websites, it’s not always easy to employ the use of lightness or darkness as too-dark of a design or too-light of text could lead to a bad user experience. What you want to do instead is create a “spotlight” of sorts. You can do this by infusing a key area of your design with a dramatic color or a boldly stylized font.
Add Clues
If you’ve ever played a horror video game before, you know how critical the element of sound can be for it.
That said, while you might not be able to direct visitors down the page with the sound of something playing down below, you can use other elements to lead them. For one, you can use interactive elements like animation to draw their attention to where it needs to go.
Employ a Mascot
For some brands, it might make sense to employ the use of an actual mascot to guide visitors through the story.
Summary
As attention spans shorten and visitors just want to get to the good stuff on a website, designers have to get more creative in how they communicate their website’s “story.” Ideally, your web design will do more showing of that story instead of telling, which is how video game design tends to succeed in this matter.
Remember: Storytelling isn’t just relegated to big brands that can weave bright and shiny tales about how consumers’ lives were changed with their products. Nor is it just for video game designers that have hours of gameplay to develop for their audiences. A story simply needs to convey to the end-user how their problem can be fixed by your site’s solution. Through subtle design strategies inspired by video game storytelling techniques, you can effectively share and shape your own story.
Estimated Hours of Learning: 28 Certificate of Completion available upon request
Learning outcomes
After participating in this eCourse, you will:
Gain experience using some of the best apps available and understand how they enable learning
Learn how to evaluate and review mobile apps
Learn how tablets complement laptops, and how their capabilities are creating new learning opportunities
Learn how apps are being used by people with special needs, and where to find additional resources for learning more
Receive guidance for creating your own app guides, offering workshops, and advising colleagues
In this 5-week eCourse, you’ll learn about the most useful apps available on tablet and mobile devices and how they can be applied in your library to create the best learning experiences for your patrons and students.
Mobile apps are empowering for people of all ages and abilities. Contrary to the popular idea that apps are only useful for “consumption,” the best apps are being used effectively as tools to enable learning and knowledge creation. In this eCourse, Nicole Hennig will show you how to incorporate apps as learning tools at your library.
Readings about security, writing, mobile apps in academia
Your thoughts on the readings (discussion forum)
Optional app review assignment
Week 3 – Reference
The Apps
Dictionaries, encyclopedias
Unit converters, maps, languages
Specialized reference apps
Subscription databases & citations
Readings & Discussion
Readings about jailbreaking, platforms, & mobile web
Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines
Your thoughts on the readings (discussion forum)
Optional app review assignment
Week 4 – Multimedia
The Apps
Art viewing
Art creation
Photography and photo editing
Music listening
Music creation
Video viewing and editing
Readings & Discussion
Readings about technology & children
Your thoughts on the readings (discussion forum)
Optional app review assignment
Week 5 – Accessibility & More
Accessibility features of mobile devices
Readings & Discussion
Readings about assistive technology
Your thoughts on the readings (discussion forum)
Idea generation assignment
Ideas for using apps in library programs & services
Apps that wow
How this eCourse Works
The eCourse begins on June 5, 2017. Your participation will require approximately five to six hours a week, at times that fit your schedule. All activities take place on the website, and you will be expected to:
Read, listen to or view online content
Post to online discussion boards
Complete weekly assignments or activities
Instructor Nicole Hennig will monitor discussion boards regularly during the five-week period, lead group discussions, and will also answer individual questions. All interaction will take place on the eCourse site, which will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s recommended that students log into the site on the first day of class or within a few days for an overview of the content and to begin the first lesson.
instructors have to take device choices into consideration when they’re choosing apps
2) Teach Not Just for Consumption but for Curation
Students use their phones to capture video or audio interviews and post them to Twitter’s live streaming service, Periscope, at various times throughout the course.
3) Try Texting for Exam Review
As an alternative, he began texting review questions every few hours for the next exam and found that he was getting a “much higher frequency of interaction.” Teacher Text, as he called it, never supplied the answers, just questions — sometimes multiple choice and other times open-ended. To keep students’ interest, he’d use at least a few of those questions on the actual test. “They’re going to be more inclined to pay attention to every question because I may give them 50 questions of review and have four or five of those on the test,” he said.
The result: “Grades started to climb pretty quickly.”
4) Perform Safe Texting, but Try It Everywhere
adopted remind from iKeepSafe, a free service that provides an interface between the teacher and the students for the purposes of texting. The tool has simplified the process of instructor texting, a practice that has overall helped students “to feel more connected.”
5) Fit Your Mobile Approach to Your Subject
[flashcard apps] like Quizlet and StudyBlue that can replicate the ongoing study or rehearsal of learning
might stream a quick lesson on the fly through Periscope or hold a 15-minute class discussion through a chat on Twitter.
“I’ll just say, ‘Here’s my hashtag, and I’m going to be live here at 9 to 9:15 p.m. Central time,'” he explained. He typically intends to broadcast a question about every five minutes and allow people to respond. “It’s interesting. You shoot out one question and you get bombarded. People are putting resources in there. In 15 minutes, I’ve barely gotten two questions off. But they have the hashtag and they can go back and harvest the resources that other people put up.”
Issues with displaying 360 video on mobiles and regular computers
this is time sensitive information; it can change at any moment. Please enter in the comment section your most recent findings and I will update the list
Finding:
360 video does not display properly in Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. The only known browser to display properly is Google Chrome. Reason:
360 video needs HMTL5 Player and does not play on the Flash platform Sources:
Web support isn’t quite so good for a couple of reasons. One is that only certain web browsers support such content. Chrome and Opera are compatible, for example, whilst Safari and Firefox are not.
Arguably the best way to experience YouTube’s 360-degree content, however, is through Google Cardboard.
Facebook is the other major portal through which 360-degree video content can be enjoyed, though it came to the game far later than Google.
Unlike Google’s YouTube implementation, however, there’s no Google Cardboard support on the VR side. Rather, Facebook recently opened out support to Samsung’s Gear VR ahead of the inevitable support from its own Oculus Rift when that launches early in 2016. http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/how-can-i-watch-facebook-360-videos-1
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360° video only works when you use the HTML5 player. Currently it’s available on Android devices and Chrome browsers. Go here –> http://youtube.com/html5 to check if you’re using the HTML5 player. https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/7sk92Fs1juk
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How do you get html5 to work with Firefox? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/958124 Videos to test:
in browser: http://bit.ly/VRlib
in YouTube: http://bit.ly/SCSULIB Panorama to test: http://bit.ly/scsuvrlib
Finding:
360 video does not display properly on Apple and Android mobile devices neither through Google Chrome browser for mobile devices nor through YouTube Reason:
360 video needs HMTL5 Player and does not play on the Flash platform Sources:
Arguably the best way to experience YouTube’s 360-degree content, however, is through Google Cardboard.
Facebook is the other major portal through which 360-degree video content can be enjoyed, though it came to the game far later than Google.
Unlike Google’s YouTube implementation, however, there’s no Google Cardboard support on the VR side. Rather, Facebook recently opened out support to Samsung’s Gear VR ahead of the inevitable support from its own Oculus Rift when that launches early in 2016. http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/how-can-i-watch-facebook-360-videos-1 Videos to test:
in browser: http://bit.ly/VRlib
in YouTube: http://bit.ly/SCSULIB
Conclusion/Resolutions:
– make sure desktop/laptop has installed Google Chrome browser. – if instructor’s station and you cannot and/or don’t have time to install, Chrome, bring your own laptop
– if possible, identify which of the students’ phones are displaying correctly (HTML5) 360 video and panorama and collaborate with students to use their phones and demonstrate to other students the Google Cardbox experience.
Adobe Spark Video is an elegant, easy-to-use tool for creating animated videos that tell a story. It’s available as a browser-based cloud app or as an iOS app. You can get it as a single app or install the 3-in-1 tool to access the Spark Post and Spark Page companion apps too.
What’s great about Spark Video is that it’s quick. You can create a compelling animated video story in just minutes without any design experience, and work on your project from anywhere. As a cloud-based tool, your progress is saved and synced automatically, so you can work on it on mobile or desktop whenever creative inspiration strikes.
Animoto
Now let’s look at a tool that’s similar to Adobe Spark, but gives you more flexibility over your content. Animoto is an affordable, cloud-based tool that offers an assortment of choices and customizations to create a one-of-a-kind video to tell your brand’s story.
This tool gives you a little more control than Adobe Spark Video. You can start with a blank canvas (choosing your own colors, styles, and frames to more closely match your brand) or adapt one of the tool’s wide variety of templates.
YouTube Director
YouTube Director is a revolutionary tool to create video ads for business. Geared toward small local businesses, it’s a foolproof way to tell a compelling story in a short format.
As you follow the prompts, you’re guided to capture images, video, and voiceovers. Then you can post the video and run a video ad campaign on YouTube.
Join Mario Callegaro, Senior Survey Research Scientist at Google UK, and one of own survey research scientists, Sarah Cho, on February 24 at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET for our webinar, Market research surveys gone mobile: Optimizing for better results.
Mario Callegaro
Senior Survey Research Scientist
Quantitative Marketing Team, Google UK
Sarah Cho
Survey Research Scientist
SurveyMonkey
.My notes from the Webinar.
Surveys uncover the WHY. Big Data,
why mobile matters. tablet and smart phone penetration: around 60-80% in Europe. According to Pew In the US, 68% smartphone and 45% tablet
faster reaction but longer questionnaire completion time on smartphones = device effects
survey design device vs. survey take device – mismatch. When there is a mismatch, questions are asked.
5 strategies to handle mobile phone respondents: 1. do nothing
surveym0nkey: do all surveys have to be mobile optimized? no, so make sure you think about the context in which you are sending out
2. discourage the use of mobile phones for answering 3. optimize the web questionnaire for mobile browsers 4. mobile app
design considerations for multiple devices surveys. two “actors”: survey designer and survey platform
confounds when interpreting findings across devices: use homogeneous population (e.g students)
difference between mouse vs fingers as input devices
what about tablets: as long as flash is not used, tablet is very much the same as laptop/desktop. phablets (iPhone growth of the screen)
mobile survey design tips (Sarah)
multiple choice: ok to use, but keep wording short, format response vertically instead of horizontally.
open-ended q type: hard to type (but no word on voice recognition???)
logo
multimedia: images, clarity, video, avoid (bandwidth constrains), use Youtube, so every device can play it, versus Flash, Java Script etc
Facebook gives priority to native videos (as opposed to video links to external sources) to encourage this type of content. Videos that are directly uploaded to Facebook perform better and provide a better experience. They receive 30% more video views than videos posted from other websites, and have images up to 11 times larger in the news feed.
TechSmith Fuse works with Camtasia Studio and Snagit. Capture the images and videos on your mobile device and send them to your desktop to use in your videos.
Reflector by Squirrels allows you to do wireless mirroring, so you can display your smartphone screen (Android or iOS) on your desktop.
Flipagram. You can record voice narration, choose from Flipagram’s music or upload 15 seconds of music you already have on your mobile device.
Diptic app is another video tool for making collages that has a newly added animation feature, which works with transitions
Boomerang is a new app from Instagram that takes a burst of photographs and stitches them together into a 1-second video and loops it forward and backward. It’s not an animated GIF, but it’s designed to look like one.
The study also looked at U.S. millennials’ consumption of various media and technologies, finding that 76 percent watch online video on a daily basis; 71 percent use social media; and 55 percent use instant messaging. They spend nearly 3 hours a day watching on-demand video and TV shows on the Internet.