Creating a brand experience that stands out at CES can be a daunting task to say the least. This year, to help demonstrate the new features of the Galaxy Note, Samsung hired artists to use the “S Pen” on the device to do sketches of folks who stop by the booth. This authentic and entertaining experience is just one of many reasons why Samsung seems to ‘win’ CES year after year.
The number of ‘digital’ screens we view every day and the sheer amount of diverse content we consume through those screens can feel overwhelming at times. How our experiences of those screens and the content we consume through them (more the latter, as screens may become antiquated) are brought together, consolidated and streamlined is the great frontier of innovation in technological development and user interface design, I believe.
The unification of experience is the term I’ll use to describe the unrealized ideal of a trend toward the coalescence of our experiences through those screens (though I’ll limit the discussion to ‘digital’ screens, as opposed to traditional ‘screens’ like book pages and canvases).
The screens I personally interact with regularly are: my personal laptop, my netbook, my personal monitor, the other personal monitor/LCD my friend loaned me, my work laptop, my work monitor, various other screens I use at work (the LCDs I use on the walls of meeting rooms and the projector in the screening room), my smart phone, and the TV in my living room.
I admit, though — I probably interact with a lot more screens than the average person. Still, according to recent research by the Council for Research Excellence (recently cited by CBS), “The average American adult now spends 8-1/2 hours a day staring into screens.” That’s not an insignificant amount of time, and chances are that those interactions aren’t limited to a single screen.
As both the number of screened devices people use and the time they spend with those devices increases, the unification of experience becomes an increasingly important idealization of a trend — and one that the titans of media and technology are seeking to attain at an ever faster clip through varying strategies and tactics.
3 Approaches That Could Work
While there are a host of innovators aiming to attain the unification of experience through myriad tacks, there are only a few avenues that I think are truly viable. Even these, though, are harried by obstacles that lead me to believe it’s unlikely that any single one of these strategies will ever have the opportunity to fully succeed.
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