Article

Olena Zanichkovska
Olena Zanichkovska 6 May 2015
Categories Innovation & Trends

How Promo Events Can Benefit From Interactive Technologies

Transform a promo event into an interactive performance with a special atmosphere that motivated people to engage into the process, communicate better and share their feedback.

In this article, you’ll learn...

  • The reasons why daring, non-standard event strategies work
  • Four steps for successfully implementing “touch free” promotion interactions

We live in an era of information overload. Every day, audiences are confronted with massive amounts of visual and verbal content. In order to rise above the noise, event marketers must do things differently. You need to grab and hold attendee attention spans while creating memorable impressions. That requires new approaches for engaging attendees, like applying emerging interactive technologies and leveraging unconventional design patterns.

A smart and well-developed approach will definitely pay off. We learned how when organizing a Behance Portfolio Review event for the designer community of Lviv, Ukraine. The event brought together creative professionals for knowledge sharing and networking.

 

Touch-free interactions boost engagement



Inspired by emerging touch-free interaction trends, we decided to experiment with motion-sensing technology to bring more interactivity to the event while boosting attendance and audience engagement. We worked out a unique approach that helped us transform a promo event into an interactive performance with a special atmosphere that motivated people to engage into the process, communicate better and share their feedback.

The method is flexible and customizable for promotional events of almost any kind. There are several important points to keep in mind for creating a truly impressive and memorable attendee experience. Four steps to successful touch-free interactions.

Let’s review the four basic steps and then you can move on to the technology implementation process.

  1. Carefully craft your concept

Technology can help you map creative ideas and processes to the real-life user experience. First you need to deeply consider the interaction scenarios that might work at your event. Clearly define the interaction patterns you would like to implement then align them with a specific technology option. In our case, the online user experience was brought to physical reality using interactive 3D technology. We wanted attendees to review Behance website showcases and vote for designs in real time without a need to utilize their gadgets. They could use simple hand gestures instead. To achieve this, we used Microsoft Kinect motion technology which senses human gestures without equipment contact or controllers.

  1. Visualization is essential

Visualization is a powerful link to your audience, so you want to make the most of it. Carefully consider the physical space at your event. This will ensure you gain the best visual representation of your concept. Stick to simple and transparent design patterns. Otherwise there is a risk of overwhelming your audience with visual information and completely distracting them. If your event involves a user interface for communicating with the audience, you can bring it to life with animation. This way attendees will experience truly responsive, live interactions. The UI we created for our event was shaped as a 3D environment with visual projections onto the wall. This allowed users to experience rich picture depth when the lights in the room were dimmed.

  1. Make sure the interaction is seamless

Your information flows with the audience should be smooth and coherent. This is one of the key principles of a high level user experience. You need to make sure the latency in UI response is minimal so the person doesn’t feel any noticeable interaction lag. It‘s crucial to provide immediate feedback for every user action. This can be a significant challenge. If your technology is smartly tuned, however, you can reduce latency to an almost unnoticeable level.

  1. Strive for a natural user experience

Whatever technology you use, make sure it’s invisible to your attendees. Create user experiences that are straightforward and intuitive. Even though you want to impress your audience with some exceptional effects, it’s better to choose interaction patterns that are transparent and natural.

While preparing the interaction scenario for our Behance installation, we aimed for simplicity and high responsiveness. We assigned swipe gestures for users to navigate through a selection of works, swiping up and down to scroll the portfolio. Two thumbs up would trigger their approval vote. It was as simple as that.

ELEKS Behance Portfolio Review Kinect Installation from ELEKS on Vimeo.

A new level of interaction

Our Kinect experiment helped improve attendance and also boosted engagement. We learned that by creating innovative and memorable event experiences, you can build a long-lived brand impression while showcasing the company’s services.

For several days after our Behance event, dozens of positive comments and likes showed up on the event Facebook page. Attendees posted numerous comments like ‘Awesome,’ and ‘Absolutely fantastic!’ Plus, our project defined a new creativity benchmark for others to follow. We turned a conventional professional community event into an inspirational performance, and everyone was thrilled.

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