February 22, 2023

Words by Tine Karlsen

Scaling Interactivity on the Web with Media.Monks

The best content on the web moves, creating memorable, immersive experiences. 

Yet, harnessing the latest web design trends to engage and impress readers is still unreasonably time consuming and expensive. Even for the most cutting-edge agencies, it's still hard to scale projects with dense animation and interactivity. We were thrilled to be invited by Media.Monks as part of their notable “Upskill Thursdays” to share the Vev vision for making interactivity easy.

Urban design, Woody plant, Building, Tree, Grass, Window
Walking shoe, Comfort, Flooring, Wood, Floor

Content as an Experience

More than ever, brands are moving away from content as passive consumption, towards content as an interactive experience. From something as simple as adding animation and slick transitions to a page, to something as complex as creating rich VR worlds, the focus is on active reader participation.

Over the past few years, we’ve noticed that more of the agencies and marketing teams that find our platform are specifically looking to scale experiential content to help brands stand out and emotionally connect with audiences on a deeper level — with the following formats being the most sought after.

Visual Storytelling

Memorable, meaningful, and highly engaging, visual storytelling is the narrative technique powering the web’s most interesting content.

Interactive Experiences

Interactivity allows the user to become an active participant of your content, even making it possible to personalize their journey.

Immersive Content

Immersive content transports your audience into another world with a heavy focus on video, interactive graphics, and 3D. This cinematic experience is particularly popular for features and long-form content, but we’ve also seen it used in campaign landing pages and brand websites to great effect.

Scrollytelling

The portmanteau of “scrolling” and “storytelling”, scrollytelling combines a variety of scroll-triggered design techniques to create a captivating, cinematic experience.

Interactive content is king

Interactive Content is King

We aren’t making it up when we say interactive content is king. We are visual creatures, so it is not surprising that interactive websites are well designed and aesthetically more attractive. Just look at some of the most famous and celebrated examples out there. Apple product pages and New York Times editorials continue to stick in the web’s memory, and are the aspirational types of content that Vev users cite again and again as the inspiration behind their creations.

Interactive content doesn’t just look cool—it performs extremely well. The success of the New York Times’ interactive content—such as their December 2022 "Inside Mar-a-Lago" article—has delivered high search volumes and website visitor numbers, as well as anchoring their brand with inspiring, thought-provoking work. Our own users continue to report a dramatic return on investment for swapping static experiences for immersive ones, with the two biggest impacts being:

  • Engagement and conversion — the intrigue and excitement of interactive content leads people to spend more time consuming it, and increases their likelihood of sharing it with others. For agencies, clients are more likely to invest in your services for more of the same.
  • Brand perception — interactive content creates novel brand experiences. This aspirational, premium content positions brands as “cutting-edge”, attracts awards, and people are more likely to remember your work.

Making

interactivity

easy

Making Interactivity Easy

Despite all of the positive impacts of interactive content, the web is still overwhelmingly static and unexciting. This is largely because creating interactive content remains so difficult — it requires a huge investment in tech, time, and resources. Development time and expense alone can make this type of content a “rare investment” — something brands reserve for one-off campaigns, and a product that agencies aren’t able to create at scale.

At Vev, we’re working to change that. We’re on a mission to help ambitious agencies and marketing teams scale their most exciting content, just as they imagined it. By removing the dependence on hard coding, our web creation platform is already helping world-class agencies and brands create immersive experiences without the traditional costs or timelines.

By combining code and no-code creation into one platform, we’ve already made interactivity:

  • Easier to communicate
  • Easier to experiment with
  • Easier to scale.

Pitching Interactive Prototypes

Many agencies still use static formats to pitch interactive ideas to potential clients, since it makes no sense to invest up front in prototyping an interactive concept that clients might not actually go for. With Vev, creative studios like Decimal can now let clients experience their concepts — helping them fully grasp complex video and 3D projects before they are built.

“Clients find it really fun to move things around and experience them—this is really what they want to see.”

Decimal

Making Advanced Animation Simple

Creative teams can find it extremely hard to see how advanced interactions and transitions will work without actually building them. Using Vev’s in-built animation tools, marketing agencies like Message Lab can now easily test ideas and create complex animations without developers that they weren’t previously able to. This capability has actually led to them securing more work and shifting their business model to scale more interactive storytelling.

“Sometimes on a project I will make 10-15 prototypes in Vev, rapidly iterating. It lets you think about something totally outside of the box.”

Message Lab

Scaling Interactivity on any Tech Stack

Development time and cost for creating interactive content aside, creating bespoke solutions across hundreds of client tech stacks is unsustainable for most agencies. By creating immersive projects in a tech-agnostic platform like Vev, agencies like Publicis can bring interactivity to any project, regardless of the platforms used by their clients.

"We can build experiential content for any client without having to think about what solution they are using."

Publicis

Pitching Interactive Prototypes

Many agencies still use static formats to pitch interactive ideas to potential clients, since it makes no sense to invest up front in prototyping an interactive concept that clients might not actually go for. With Vev, creative studios like Decimal can now let clients experience their concepts — helping them fully grasp complex video and 3D projects before they are built.

“Clients find it really fun to move things around and experience them—this is really what they want to see.” — Decimal

Making Advanced Animation Simple

Creative teams can find it extremely hard to see how advanced interactions and transitions will work without actually building them. Using Vev’s in-built animation tools, marketing agencies like Message Lab can now easily test ideas and create complex animations without developers that they weren’t previously able to. This capability has actually led to them securing more work and shifting their business model to scale more interactive storytelling.

“Sometimes on a project I will make 10-15 prototypes in Vev, rapidly iterating. It lets you think about something totally outside of the box.” — Message Lab

Scaling Interactivity on any Tech Stack

Development time and cost for creating interactive content aside, creating bespoke solutions across hundreds of client tech stacks is unsustainable for most agencies. By creating immersive projects in a tech-agnostic platform like Vev, agencies like Publicis can bring interactivity to any project, regardless of the platforms used by their clients.

"We can build experiential content for any client without having to think about what solution they are using." — Publicis

How Easy Is It, Exactly?

For ambitious creative agencies like Media.Monks, hard coding is a way of life, and no-code creation is often seen as involving some form of creative compromise. Obviously, we needed to challenge that. To  demonstrate how incredibly easy it is to craft wildly creative interactive content in Vev, we built the Media.Monks website in Vev. It took one designer three hours.

With Vev’s library of pre-coded components and animations — from Lottie animations and scroll speed add-ons, to sticky positioning and show/hide components — you don’t need to write a single line of code to create a stunning interactive website. Of course, you still have the freedom to custom code anything you want too: building your own React components from scratch or coding on top of our pre-built ones to save more time.

If you’d like to learn more about interactivity in Vev — or invite us to talk at your next team workshop — get in touch at hello@vev.design.

Ready to Experience the Future of Web Creation?

Vev is a new breed of web creation platform built for designers, developers, and marketers. It provides a single space for teams to create anything front-end on the web — from websites, landing pages, reports, presentations, and beyond. Publish your work anywhere on the web when you’re ready.

Create a free account today and have a play around with Vev, or book a demo for a personal introduction.

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