If you’re looking to make a few changes to your advertising and marketing strategies this year, it could prove particularly fruitful to chat to your Salford digital agency and make mention of calm design, where technology is tailored in such a way that it’s less intrusive on people’s lives.
As consumers, we’ve all been there… feeling chained to our smartphones, tablets and other connected devices as if there’s no escape from the technological world.
As convenient and useful as it is to have the Internet of Things and have gadgets that make us reachable at all times, it can also prove to be quite burdensome – and it can take its toll on an emotional level, with all the constant beeps, pop-ups and interruptions from our endless array of gadgets.
No doubt this is partly why there was a recent surge in the number of dumb phone purchases, phones that aren’t connected to anything at all!
Calm design technology has the potential to sidestep this as an issue, however, since it allows people to remain connected with their devices while allowing them to live their lives without endless technological interruptions.
But how, exactly? Think about your website from a usability point of view… when you hit the homepage, are there lots of pop-ups? Do chatbot speech bubbles appear constantly? Are people incessantly being asked to download something, click on something, read something? This is all noise to website visitors and could be why people leave your site rather quickly, without actually seeing what you’ve got to offer.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t advertise to potential customers – only that you’ve got to do it in a less obtrusive manner. Ads should be integrated quietly so that people barely even notice them, so you can attract attention without being a distraction.
Check out the Digital Wellbeing scheme being run by Google at the moment. As the tech giant explains, it’s now dedicated to creating tools and features that are “truly helpful” to one and all, allowing them to understand their tech usage more effectively, focusing on what matters the most, disconnecting when required and creating “healthy habits for the whole family”.
“We’re committed to giving everyone the tools they need to develop their own sense of digital wellbeing. So that life, not the technology in it, stays front and centre,” Google goes on to say.
Author of Calm Technology Amber Case has some helpful insights on how to prioritise this particular concept, outlining eight principles that could prove useful for brands to bear in mind.
The first principle, for example, states that tech should require the smallest amount of attention possible, communicating information without taking the user away from their task or out of their environment.
The second states that tech should inform and create calm, giving people what they require to solve their particular problem and nothing more since a person’s primary task should be being human, not computing.