If you are in charge of video content creation for your company, then like me, you probably spend most of your time worried about telling a great story – be that an intimate portrait of a noteworthy individual, a snazzy product or brand promotion, or developing effective training videos. You start with the subject matter, find an interesting angle on the story, and begin exploring the script and the visuals. Through all of this, you’ve got your target audience in mind. You then take your raw materials, and you start to sculpt something worth watching – a video that connects with your audience (you hope!) and one that elicits a certain emotional state or behavior. You ask: What do I want my viewer to think? To Feel? To Do? This is a familiar process for us filmmakers and marketers. We do it reflexively.

But if audience engagement is really what we are after, then there is an important new skill we must learn this year to get even more value from the video content we are creating. It’s time to think about more than making and distributing stories. We have to become designers of the story experience.

What is meant by Designing The Story Experience?

Early in my career, I was privileged to work for a global design agency where we lived by one maxim: that the essence of Design, as Charles Eames said, was “the artful arrangement of elements to achieve a certain purpose.” Whether consciously or subconsciously, many of us probably use some version of this maxim in our daily work, whether we are meticulously knitting together video footage into emotive scenes, laying out information on a web page, or crafting an executive presentation. We look at individual elements, combining and recombining them until the most artful and purposeful arrangement can be achieved to tell a story that achieves its goal.

However, in many cases, we filmmakers and marketers are still principally focused on the words and images as the main elements to be arranged and rearranged. We are constantly refining what we say and what we see. Yet designing the full story experience invites us to also design what the audience does inside and outside the frame as they progress through the story. How should our audience interact with the video that is being presented? Should they passively view or actively engage? Does the audience’s participation in the story offer new and exciting ways for me to tell it?

Considering Video Player Possibilities Is Essential to Story Experience Design

Advances in technology are making new forms of video interactivity, and thus new forms of story experience design, possible. But unlocking those possibilities requires us to pay close attention to a design element that we have mostly ignored: The Video Player. Historically, there are many elements that are carefully considered in our stories: the script, the visuals, the audience journey, even the distribution platforms. But that little black box known as “The Player” was mostly devoid of consideration. Players were just players, innocuous and easy to ignore. Sure, there were format options like Flash and now HTML5. And more recently, there have been enhanced display options like lightboxing. But for the most part, player design was quite limited to functional control settings or basic aesthetics; it wasn’t part of the narrative arc of a story. Moreover, players have long been considered ‘technical’ – owned and controlled by people with different skills sets who worked in different departments than us. Our companies, often someone in a Web division or IT, provisioned us with Players. We didn’t get a say.

2015 is going to be a different year for Video Players, and for the design thinkers among you, it offers a fantastic opportunity to take your stories and give them even higher impact (dare I say, higher ROI).

Disappearing are the days when we have no say in which player technologies we are using. Most marketing and communications departments are making technology selection a strategic priority. Gone are the days when we don't have control over the player functionality. If you can dream it, you can probably find a player technology that supports it. In the same way that the advent of DVDs allowed us to extend the story experience by packaging all sorts of bonus material with our primary content, the new wave of video player innovations allows us to similarly package up and extend our stories in an infinite number of ways. All that remains is for us to fully embrace The Video Player as a vital ingredient to be artfully and purposefully deployed in our overall story experience design.

What the Future Holds for Enterprise Video Player Design

The world of enterprise video is evolving to a state where a single, rigid player technology will become anathema. Enterprises will require a family of flexible, customizable players for Pervasive Use Cases and Special Occasions.

Pervasive Use Cases

Think of pervasive use cases as your bread-and-butter video workflows. These are the activities you do regularly and repeatedly. You broadcast quarterly earnings meetings. You publish weekly sales promotions. You share new training videos each month. You host your annual trade show. While the videos you are creating or streaming change at each release, the needs of the audience on the receiving end are likely consistent. Employees will want to comment real-time while the quarterly earnings are being broadcast. Shoppers will want to purchase in-frame without having to go searching for a sales outlet online. Trainees will want to quiz themselves to make sure they grokked a new concept or download a cheatsheet to remember what they learned. Your stakeholders and influencers will want to follow the minute-by-minute activity at your annual event.

Each of these examples suggests its own customized player experience specific to the use case. For example, an organization with these use cases may want to create a family of branded players that includes a Real-Time Player, an E-Commerce Player, a Training Player, or a Buzz-Building Player.

Here is a very simple example of a player we customized and now use regularly to fit one of our own pervasive use cases. Because we regularly interview thought leaders, we said: hey, wouldn’t it be interesting to not only have the video of this influential person speaking, but also be able to pull up their Twitter feed real-time within the frame to reinforce their image as a thought leader? This simple Twitter Player achieves that goal and allows us to extend the story experience beyond the actual video.

 

Special Occasions

Special occasions are your one-time video workflows. Perhaps your company is making a big investment in a major milestone and is pulling out all the stops to make that event feel unique and differentiated from the everyday videos you’re used to publishing. Or maybe you’re just feeling inspired to do something attention-grabbing and different, and you want the flexibility to try new things. The special occasions of today can often become the pervasive use cases of tomorrow.

Again, designing not only the content itself but the overall story experience can offer the unique, differentiated or attention-grabbing experience your require for special occasions.

Here is an example of a special occasion player we pulled together as part of our SXSW 2015 outreach. Because Austin is a hotbed of innovation for both filmmakers and interactive designers, we thought it was critical to our story to do more than just shoot a video. Instead, we opted for curating some of our favorite SXSW videos and placing them inside this customized “Postcard Player.” What better way to get both our film and interactive friends excited about their upcoming trip than by delivering both fun videos and a playful new interactive experience? What’s more, we can reuse the interaction design and simply swap out the thumbnail for a different image map should we ever want to do more with this player.

 

 

Story Experience Design is the #1 New Skill You Must Learn in 2015

So for you video content creators who are asking yourself what new skill you should acquire this year, take note. 2015 is the year The Video Player will become core to the story design process. Make a point to learn all of the things the new wave of interactive players, and especially player frameworks and platforms, can enable. If you are interested in more than just passive viewership, and it is audience engagement you crave, then it is time to unlock all of the possibilities of that little black box.