opinion
Digital encounters
Digital experiences shouldn’t be about technology,
they need to be about the experience itself
By Neil Farr, Managing Director, Acquire Digital – www.acquiredigital.com
It’s hard to believe but when I started my
working life in 1991 for an A/V company,
it was ground-breaking that we moved
from a bank of slide projectors to having
a single computer and a projector to
show presentations.
For a meeting with a client, we had
to use printed maps to get there, and
had to stop to ask directions or to find
a telephone box to call the client to say
we were lost and may be late. Videos
were grainy, and VHS tape and even
broadcast quality video had problems.
But back then, everyone thought it was
an amazing time to be alive with all of
this technology available.
Later, we started using the
presentations in retail stores on big
old TVs, using slow 14.4Kbps dial up
modems to show in-store TV that we
could update remotely (albeit slowly).
And then, we realised we could also use
28 KIOSK solutions
the same technology with a touchscreen
on the front of the monitor in a box to
provide loyalty schemes, or targeted
coupon delivery and endless aisles.
Everything then changed – a thing
called the World Wide Web appeared,
and people could see reams of text and
occasionally singing, dancing hamsters
appear on their computer screens – so
long bulletin boards.
People then realised that we needed
a faster way to get the dancing hamsters
to our screens, and the speed of the
internet went up – faster and faster.
Consoles appeared, and people who
didn’t sit at computer desks put them
under their televisions in the lounge
where the whole family discovered
entertainment could be more than
simply watching VHS tapes, and could
actually be interactive. This led to
needing faster and better Internet
connections as people were demanding
better multimedia and videos and didn’t
like reading reams of text on the web.
Head first into digital
Technology continued on apace with a
new solutions and features making most
industries play catch-up, or trying to have
a newer and better features themselves.
The thing was, the public’s appetite for
this new digital age and what could be
delivered could never be sated.
Then a company who had been
making one of the most popular
devices capable of not needing to stop
at phone boxes to ask directions –
Nokia – announced to the world that
the Internet was now truly mobile too
with their WAP-capable 7110 phone.
But when people realised WAP wasn’t
quite as good as their home computer
at accessing well, pretty much anything.
But they still liked the idea of having a
handheld device that removed the need
to carry around a diary, notepad, music
player, games console and more. They
tried device after device known as a PDA
which promised to do all this. Shortly
after, a company called Apple released a
miniature computer, with a touchscreen