As part of our continuing effort to test, improve and update our interactive print resources and tools, we have made a significant upgrade to our calls-to-action.
Our research and experience have shown that proper calls-to-action are imperative to the success of an interactive print campaign. Alerting your users through descriptive and explanatory calls-to-action is, more often than not, more important than the overall quality of the digital content. After all, if users don’t know about your content, it doesn’t matter how great it is!
Thanks to over 40,000 Creator editors publishing campaigns, popular interactive print titles reaching millions of homes monthly, over 30 million Layar App users and sophisticated analytics, we have a unique vantage point from which to observe how users are consuming interactive print.
Based on our observations, we have identified the most effective calls-to-action. Therefore, we have reviewed, user-tested and redesigned our calls-to- action to better provide you with the most efficient ways to make your campaigns more apparent to your users.
The Call-to-Action Guidelines are part of our goal to unify calls-to-action across campaigns to educate new interactive print users while providing a seamless experience.
Our friends at the Dutch fashion brand SuitSupply are back again with a huge, week-long insert campaign in the Wall Street Journal.
Just a few months ago in March we shared how SuitSupply launched its spring catalogue with an interactive print campaign that let you purchase items and see behind the scenes videos from their stylish photoshoots. Now, the brand is making a big push in the United States, publishing an interactive fashion newspaper in the Wall Street Journal.
The 32-page insert has been running since last Friday, May 9th and has the potential to reach 1.2 million subscribers per day. With the help of Layar partner Limebizz, the newspaper was made interactive with the Layar Creator.
“We’re getting a bigger footprint in the U.S., and we’re seeing lots more people going to our online store, so it made sense to do some with a bit of a broader reach,” CEO Fokke de Jong said in an interview with BusinessWeek.
The insert is a huge ad campaign from SuitSupply, and the fact that they’ve chosen to make it an interactive print campaign with Layar’s technology says a lot about their confidence in this new medium.
Brands are seeing higher engagement in ads and editorial content with interactive print, so it’s no surprise the SuitSupply again has chosen interactive print for this important campaign.
As augmented reality and interactive print continue to grow, it is becoming clear that many more people now understand that a whole new world is emerging. We now have designers and engineers specifically working on AR projects, and with that comes and increasing amount of theory and best practices for AR user experience.
We recently saw this article by UX Magazine about augmented reality and user experience and we noticed how it related to interactive print in some places. In the article, authors Olli Siebelt and Michael Marina provide some starting guidelines for thinking about user experience when developing augmented reality experiences.
Consider Context
They mention first to categorize and plan your project based on the intended use case, and the same can be said for developing an interactive print campaign with Layar.
It is important to consider differences in context when enhancing a magazine page versus and billboard ad or product packaging. The experience needs to feel natural to users, and what feels natural will vary between these different scenarios.
Real World Testing Another tip – to go out and test in the real world before creating your project – can also be translated to interactive print campaigns. It was important for Layar Partner Limebizz to know the environment in which one of its latest campaigns would be displayed.
The bright orange mystery crate displayed in Antwerp’s central station was a very unique use of interactive print for users. Instead of holding a magazine in their hand, they were standing amidst a busy train station with varying lighting throughout the day. The results were terrific!
Design for Mobile And finally, having a eye for design for the small screen is one of the big points made in the AR UX article. This also applies to interactive print. It’s very important that visual assets are easy to view and read on a mobile device, and that any web-based content linked to from your print is mobile-friendly.
See More In Our Guide! These are just a few of the great tips we provide in our comprehensive Best Practices Guide! Have a look at the steps you can take toward more effective interactive print campaign creation, including:
Getting started with interactive print
Best practices for the Layar Creator
Concepting your campaign
“Dos and Don’ts” for instruction pages, calls-to-action and more
“Imagine being able to interact with your newspaper, purchase what you want whenever you want it, investigate your interests, look past the surface,” the ad says. “Don’t just read your newspaper, experience it.”
It’s a really well-made ad and it perfectly explains the core benefits of interactive print - being able to bring the digital interactivity we know and love from the web to print materials.
Today we’ve added some great new features to the Layar Creator which now make it easier for developers to quickly implement engaging augmented reality experiences with Layar Vision.
In addition to making the uploading of page files easier and adding a social Share Page button (see our blog on these items here), we’ve added a pair of advanced features that make the Creator more powerful than ever. With the new Custom URI Scheme button and JSON Hotspot widget, developers can now add hooks to third-party applications and drop Layar Vision code directly into the Layar Creator.
Custom URI Scheme Button
Some third-party apps use a custom URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) scheme to allow deep linking to actions within the app. For example, a link from any application on iOS or Android to “layar://layarname” will open a layer in the Layar App (granted the user has Layar installed on their device).
With this technique and depending on the schemes provided by various apps, you can add interactive print links to perform various functions on a user’s device, including view a map or directions, play a song or other media and much more! It’s especially useful to direct a user to an action within your own app from the Layar App.
JSON Hotspot Widget
Many developers have already used the Layar API to create Vision layers, and now you can simply drop your JSON code into the Creator to make publishing this content much easier! The advantage is that it supports more features than the Creator does natively, including 3D models and animation.
Anyone with knowledge of JSON and 3D modelling can easily create and publish a 3D augmented reality experience within the Layar Creator. A majority of hotspot-level features of the Layar API are supported with the exception of any feature that requires communication with a dynamic back-end (e.g. asynchronous actions).
These improvements are all part of our commitment to providing the best augmented reality and interactive print solutions for both publishers and developers alike.
Photo by Will Halsey/Bloomberg Businessweek
