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Does your business want to transform the way it produces content and make videos more engaging across the workforce? To enable a far greater immersive experience, interactive videos will capture an audience’s imagination far more than traditional linear storytelling.

With the wealth of information available today, people are struggling to consume traditional content. Yet in most cases, businesses don’t have the experience required to use multi-layered technology to turn traditional passive content into an engaging and interesting experience.

Engaging employees through interactive videos

Interactive videos can transform the enterprise by revolutionising the way employees communicate, engage and learn. Giving viewers the opportunity to interact with video and control the narrative results in a far more impressive and memorable experience.

By incorporating interactive triggers into videos, there is more opportunity to engage with the narrative, whether it’s for product launches, training videos, vlogs or company announcements.

Additionally, interactive video can complement live video events. This could be to give the viewer the ability to change camera angles or allow them to branch off to pre-recorded interactive video. Microsites can also support and enhance the experience and provide additional content, such as extra downloads or links to other relevant content. Alternatively, interactive videos can be housed within an existing intranet platform or learning management system.

Tips for producing an interactive video

How you produce an interactive video depends largely on the topic and messaging – this is a key part of the process when it comes to planning the format, storyboards and technology. As interactive videos are set up around various branching options and decision trees, the production needs to be very carefully planned so that content doesn’t look disjointed.

DO:

• Keep the branches quite narrow: Make them short (2 to 3 minutes) and to the point.

• Give people choices: However, make sure you keep bringing them back to the same storyline. You can also target different audience segments within the design.

• Incorporate gestures, voice, touches, decision choices or menu options: Allow viewers to steer the direction of the story as they play an active role in the viewing experience through decisions that are made via clickable areas.

• Use different scenarios to adapt the style of video: It won’t always be a yes or no, or a right or wrong.

DON’T:

• Trap people into doing something they can’t get out of: Give viewers the opportunity to make more choices.

• Forget about your audience: Unlike traditional linear video, interactive videos don’t allow you to skip ahead or jump back. This is why it’s important to understand your audience, their expectations and needs during the pre-production process.

• Offer too many choices: In order to offer a seamless interactive video experience, it’s often better to start off with limited choices.

• Underestimate the power of analytics: Data can be captured and reviewed around choices, decisions, scoring and timings. In terms of real-time analytics, you can present information back to the viewer using a live dashboard.

The future of interactive video

Interactive videos can be fun to make, but they can become complicated. There are several technology providers offering platforms for creating them and they all have their pros and cons. For example, interactive videos work well in built-in web browsers on all desktops, tablets and mobiles, but in-video navigation is not available on iPhones unless you download the associated native app.

Interactive videos generally require more planning and technical skills, but the simplest videos can be just as powerful as the more complex narratives. There’s also no reason why interactive videos can’t be done on a smaller budget. On the other hand, complex productions that require more branching choices, performance and analytics, can easily cost the same to film as post-production.