Electronic interactive media: It's a fancy name that we like to use in the fields of Marketing and
Advertising to describe and distinguish what you're doing right now as opposed to what you're doing when
you watch television, read a magazine, or have a conversation with a friend or salesperson. The Internet
is different somehow -- we realize this -- but we're not exactly sure how it's different, or even why we
care.
I'd like to suggest that the "interactive" label we apply to the Internet experience in general, and the
web-browsing experience in particular, is exaggerated and misused. The only "interaction" that I can find
evident in the majority of my browsing involves my right index finger scrolling and clicking the mouse ball
and buttons.
Now we know that the involvement of multiple senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) in any
activity increases attention, learning, and recall. In most cases, those three mental states are the
primary objective of any communications medium. If I'm looking at the screen (sight) and rolling my
trackball (touch), I'm using multiple senses, no? If you tack on some obnoxious sound file that's recorded
at three times normal volume level so that the shock knocks me out of my seat, you've added a third sense,
right?
(As soon as Microsoft completes development of the scratch-n-sniff plugin for Internet Explorer, we'll
have four senses covered. I can't think of even a remotely plausible application for adding the sense of
taste to our Internet experience; judging from a lot of the web sites out there, taste is not a criteria,
anyway.)
I don't believe that rolling a trackball or sliding a mouse around on its little pad qualifies as
interaction. It's routine -- that's how we navigate every application that appears on our monitor.
Moving or clicking the mouse is equivalent to turning the page in a magazine, and we don't consider that
interactive.
I don't believe that adding unrelated sound files qualifies as interaction, either. They may grab
our attention momentarily, but at least in my case, they tend to lead me on a search for a way to turn
them off. At best, they're distracting and actually hinder the learning process rather than assist it.
My Conclusion: The vast majority of simple web sites on the Internet today are not interactive at all.
So what constitutes an interactive Internet experience? I believe the answer is active participation on
the part of the viewer -- a conscious and motivated decision to voluntarily engage, in a meaningful way,
one or more of the senses in the experience.
Sign a guestbook, for example, or post a message in an online forum. It takes conscious will and effort
to do that. Not only that, but you (usually) receive immediate feedback from the effort: refresh the
page and there you are -- electronically immortalized in the pages of a perfect stranger. You've played
a part now in the actual design of that stranger's site. You own a small piece of that virtual real
estate.
There are hundreds of other ways to make your web site truly interactive: uploads and downloads,
shopping carts, registration forms, games, surveys, quizzes, ... It is, in fact, scripting that provides
meaningful interactivity. Now, that does not mean that you should install dozens of scripts and programs
just for the sake of providing some scripts and programs. "Meaningful" is the key word here. Make them
useful, entertaining, and relevant to the whole experience, or they make no more sense than embedding your
favorite midi of the William Tell Overture on a web site that's not devoted to old reruns of the Lone
Ranger.
Bottom line is this: Involve your visitors in a meaningful way; provide them the opportunity to have
some ownership in your site. They'll respond by paying attention to your message. They'll be more
favorably inclined to accept that message. They'll remember your message. And, they might come back to
experience it again.
