Democratizing Animation

Marketers know that few tools are as effective in engaging your audience as a well-crafted animation. Traditionally, however, this type of material has been extremely labor-intensive – and therefore costly – to produce.

Yet LottieFiles is a company looking to change all that with its open-source tool that allows animators to spend less time learning and deploying complex code and more time crafting captivating content that will wow users and increase conversion rates.

LottieFiles allows designers to spend less time learning and deploying complex code and more time crafting captivating content
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Lottiefiles is a lightweight, interactive, and scalable animation format that allows for customization without having to code, build and render bulky files from scratch. In fact, Lottie files are, on average, 600% smaller than other popular animation formats such GIFs, allowing for a much faster, more responsive, and therefore engaging user experience (UX).

Lottie files are on average 600% smaller than GIFs, allowing for a much faster, responsive, and engaging user experience
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Popular apps such as Airbnb and Duolingo have wholeheartedly embraced this user-friendliness. Use cases for Lottie animations range from app loading and wait screes to gamification and user onboarding, as well a vast array of websites and apps looking to serve meaningful content to their users, according to LottieFiles CTO Nattu Adnan

“LottieFiles has helped hundreds of thousands of developers and designers from over 65,000 global fortune companies like Netflix, Disney, Google and Amazon to ship interactive animation faster and more effectively,” adds the company’s Co-Founder and CEO Kshitij Minglani.

Augmenting Reality

AR (Augmented Reality) has been steadily gathering momentum in recent years, and it is easy to see why. Merging the physical and digital worlds is an exciting proposition that opens up a whole world of possibilities for users, and the companies hoping to reach and keep them engaged.

From new ways of experiencing art to enabling customers to realistically try products before committing to a purchase, Augmented Reality is becoming ever more pervasive across an incredibly broad swathe of industries.

Augmented Reality is becoming ever more pervasive across an incredibly broad swathe of industries.
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“Research shows that AR will evolve from one-off ‘surprise and delight’ moments to provide everyday utility and practical value, right across the consumer journey.  This could include helping people visualize how products look in their home, locating products in-store through wayfinding applications, or getting more out of a product post-purchase through usage guidance,” explains Jeremy Pounder, Futures Director at Mindshare UK

One example of how it is possible for innovative companies to bring their customers the best of both worlds by creating Omnichannel experiences is Canadian start-up StickerYou which offers customized, die-cut stickers online, but also maintains a physical shop where customers can touch and feel the merchandise.

“The broader trend in retail, particularly among millennials, is a shift in focus from products toward experiences. For this reason, many customers still choose to visit a physical shop even if it may be more convenient to order the item online, explains StickerYou Founder and President, Andrew Witkin. “For retailers, this presents an opportunity to leverage technology to literally augment the value of their products for their customers,” he concludes.

Meeting Virtually

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic became the catalyst for what we now know as a socially distanced “new normal,” technology had been pushing us towards having more of our interactions in virtual environments.

From virtual live comedy shows to professional poker tournaments, people had started to not only accept the premise of hosting their familiar interactions and experiences in immersive virtual worlds.

Technology has been pushing us towards having more of our interactions in virtual environments
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Given the continuation of the pandemic, however, we have seen most events in the global conference calendar going virtual in some way or another, including one of the biggest highlights in the tech circuit – South by Southwest (SXSW) which is held in Austin, Texas in March.

SXSW Online 2021 included a variety of online meetings, sessions, musical performances, and many attempts at virtually recreating the interactive experience of SXSW.

As Tech Trends correspondent Laura Kobylecky reports, the world of virtual Austin exists within VRChat, an online, virtual reality, social platform which added a layer of immersion and interactivity to this year’s online conference and left her feeling as if she’d really attended the event.

Tech Trends’  Consultancy services offer support for companies looking to enhance their brand’s digital strategy with immersive and emerging technologies such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

Alice Bonasio is a technology journalist, communications consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Top UI/UX Trends for 2021 appeared first on Tech Trends.

Companies can now track where a users’ gaze wanders and use that data to design fine-tuned experiences.

Eye-tracking technology is nothing new in itself, but it is gaining rapidly both in scope and popularity as immersive virtual experiences become more widely used both in business and leisure contexts.

This type of technology is a natural fit for VR, as most headsets have inbuilt eye-tracking technology to allow them to deliver immersive experiences in the first place, as gaze is one of the primary ways in which you interact with those types of environment.

Eye-tracking technology is gaining in scope and popularity as immersive virtual experiences become more widely used
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This type of technology is a natural fit for VR, as most headsets have inbuilt eye-tracking technology to allow them to deliver immersive experiences
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After developing eye-tracking commercial solutions for years, Swedish company Tobii Pro is now bringing to market a new analytical tool which leverages these capabilities in Tobii Pro VR.

The tool integrates into Unity environments and allows eye-tracking studies to be conducted within 3D virtual reality environments. It also comes with automated features for visualizing and measures what a user sees, tracking their interactions and navigations within a simulated world.

“Using eye tracking within a VR environment helps us better understand how people navigate around a space. We can design better wayfinding systems and start to explore issues much earlier”, said David Watts, Managing Director of consultancy firm CCD Design & Ergonomics. “We want to bring evidence into the design process, the visualizations tell us what people actually look at and how their attention is drawn to different design interventions we make. This methodology is so much more powerful than relying on our own intuition about what does and doesn’t work. It also provides a great visual record to demonstrate behaviors to others in the design team”.

Access to analytics from eye-tracking data, navigation and interactions is instant and visualizations are automated, with heat and opacity maps showing the points in a VR landscape that received the most attention. Scene overview with path maps illustrate how one or multiple study participants moved through the scene providing an understanding for foot traffic and potential bottleneck areas.

Gaze is one of the primary ways in which you interact with VR
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With Instant access to eye-tracking analytics, brands, retailers and designers are able to analyze the key influencers of behavior and decision-making throughout the consumer journey, according to Tom Englund, President, Tobii Pro.

A retailer, for example, can quickly iterate between layouts of a store design and track the visual attention to arrive at one that is optimized to how shoppers walk the space and pick up items along the way, while commercial brands can test variations of product packaging within a realistic virtual store setup to see which are most likely to get picked from the shelf by the customer.

With attention spans getting ever shorter and users perceptual vigilance getting more difficult to bypass, this kind of analytics is gaining in popularity
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With Instant access to eye-tracking analytics, brands, retailers and designers are able to analyze the key influencers of behavior and decision-making throughout the consumer journey
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There are many other potential applications of this type of technology beyond sales and consumer engagement, however. A manufacturing company can place workers in different training scenarios to evaluate reactions and responses. Eye tracking will help determine what can be done to help workers identify the warning signs of an accident before one occurs. As Englund explains, this new VR analysis tool opens up the possibility for much more efficient, engaging and safer training of individuals particularly in complex and high-risk occupations such as industrial, medical, and emergency response.

“Eye tracking has proved to be a natural part of VR, and the launch of Tobii Pro VR Analytics is major step towards our larger vision to also provide businesses and researchers with the tools to capture insights from these immersive environments. VR puts you in complete control of an environment while eye tracking explains our behavior while in that world – a powerful combination making the behavioral insights accessible to many more people.”

Within a hospital environment, for instance, it is possible to deploy this technology to accurately simulate specific types of surgery (in fact there are many products which also add a haptics layer to those simulations for even greater levels of realism) and observe the attention and visual skills of surgeons as they practice performing complex techniques. This allows teachers and supervisors to track factors such as how aware a student is of their surroundings or how often they check instruments and displays for example. It also allows them to make mistakes and get constructive and concrete feedback on those without impacting on a real patient’s health.

Eye tracking has proved to be a natural part of VR
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“A construction company could lay out a whole building design during the concept phase and track people’s attention and navigation to determine optimal placement of signage and functions such as emergency exits,” adds Englund.

With attention spans getting ever shorter and users perceptual vigilance getting more difficult to bypass, this kind of analytics is gaining in popularity. One clear advantage of relying on eye-tracking techniques is that it tends to capture much more candid results, as you are not relying on eliciting verbal responses from the user. In fact, users might not always be aware of where their attention is wandering, as many such moves happen on the periphery of our consciousness, so the combination of eye tracking and VR can uncover the factors that drive human attention across an unlimited number of scenarios.

This article was originally published on Forbes

Looking Through Your User’s Eyes With Virtual Reality Gaze Trackinghttps://t.co/Mj9Vog5ywm

— Forbes Tech News (@ForbesTech) June 21, 2018

To find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your enterprise, Tech Trends offers bespoke Virtual Reality Consultancy support

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post #BuildTheFuture > Gaining Behavioural Insight with Eye-Tracking VR Tech appeared first on Tech Trends.

Bad tech and bad service are never nice, but when they come from your favourite brand it feels like a betrayal.

Let me start this by saying I think Amazon.co.uk is FANTASTIC.

I preface with that because I’ve come to realize that for some US readers this will come as something of a cultural shock. Much like telling them that in England I don’t pay to go to a doctor or that I’ve never held a driver’s licence.

Amazon in the UK is fantastic. In the US it's another story entirely
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I know people have all sorts of valid issues against Amazon’s tax practices or cutthroat business strategy, but for the purpose of this rant let’s stick with the customer experience angle. And from that perspective, as I was saying, Amazon in the UK is VERY good.

Their app just works, their desktop site just works, the deliveries… just work. On the very rare occasions when things go slightly wrong, they’re quick to put it right. With a couple of swift finger strokes you can get pretty much anything delivered to your door, and as an Amazon Prime customer, 9 times out of 10 it arrives within 24 hours or less, even though I live in a small town in Somerset rather than, say, London, where you can get same-day delivery.

As an Amazon Prime customer in the UK, 9 times out of 10 I get what I order in 24 hours or less
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I get all my pet supplies and a bunch of household stuff on subscription, plus several orders a week ranging from perfume to electronics, books or bourbon. They get a lot of my money and I’m quite happy with that arrangement.

So having just moved to the US, one of the first things I did upon arrival was download the Amazon.com app and – since I don’t yet have a car – start ordering some things to save me having to pay for a $30 Lyft or harass my brother for a ride to the shops. “Walking Distance” is not really a thing over here.

I also went ahead and signed up for Amazon Prime, noting that here that only gets you free 2-Day delivery instead of next (or same) day. It was more expensive than in Blighty too, but hey, I figured that this is a much bigger country after all, so two days is still OK.

But two months is not.

Which is why this morning as I was talking to Amazon’s customer service people I started to wonder whether I was experiencing some sort jetlag-induced hallucination. But at the end of one of the most frustrating half-hours I’ve spent on the phone since I last tried booking a flight with British Airways, my worst fears were confirmed. Amazon in the US is nothing like what we get in the UK.

Amazon.com sold me a prime subscription with a promise of 2-day delivery, which turned out to be two months
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They deliberately sold me this service advertising delivery within two days. I filtered my searches so that they’d only show results eligible for Prime delivery, and upon checkout I selected the box that explicitly spelled out that I would get my item within 2 days.

Yet as soon as that order came through, it told me the window for delivery was that it would “usually be dispatched within 1-2 months”. I s**t you not.

Apparently, it makes sense that the 2-day delivery only kicks in once Amazon receives the item from the seller. So the entire Prime proposition is beyond worthless, as you have no idea whatsoever of when you’re going to get the item you ordered.

Apparently, it makes sense that the 2-day delivery only kicks in once Amazon receives the item from the seller
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Of course this wasn’t the first, nor will it be the last bad online shopping experience I’ll have, but when that level of WTF comes from a brand that you’ve used, trusted and swore by for close to two decades, it feels much more personal.

When that level of WTF comes from a brand that you’ve used, trusted and swore by for close to two decades, it feels like a betrayal
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So I’ve deleted my app, cancelled my “Prime” subscription, and will have to learn to cope with a more retro way of shopping. When in Rome… Go to Walmart

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post How Amazon Broke My Heart appeared first on Tech Trends.