Honda puts the user in the driving seat

World Usability Day is fast approaching and this year’s theme is ‘engagement’.

Obviously inspired by this (although admittedly the timing could just be coincidental!) Honda has commissioned an interesting video promotion(this will open in a new window) that aims to ‘engage’ the user in a way not always attempted in online video advertising.

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Online video is often praised for its effectiveness and measurability in comparison to ‘traditional media’ equivalents such as print, radio and television advertising. But, despite being contained within one of the most interactive mediums yet devised, online video is often still designed for passive consumption.

The resulting risk is that potential customers may have neither the time nor the inclination to sit through even relatively short videos online.

Unless viewing the advert is what they went online to do, many users will be more likely to hit the ‘Skip’ option to get to a YouTube video or the deliberately-tiny ‘x’ button to close an overlay than to sit through the advertiser’s carefully crafted movie masterpiece.

The difficulty for producers therefore is finding an approach that stands out amidst the noise of social media, banner and interstitial video messaging.

Employing user engagement is not a new technique to achieve this differentiation with many banner and other ads having animated rollover states to pique peoples’ interest.

User as Director

The approach in this Honda ad, however, is novel enough to be noteworthy. While viewing the ad, pressing the ‘R’ key (tying in to Honda’s sporting Type R sub-brand) changes the view between two distinct but parallel time-synched versions of the video.

When viewed on mobile devices, a separate ‘R’ button is placed adjacent to the video as a substitute for the physical key.

Allowing the user to discover each story by manually switching between them casts the user as much in the role of director as consumer, revealing piecemeal details of each version of the video as they cross between them.

This higher level of engagement should make it far more likely that users will not only want to watch the whole video but will also be motivated to re-watch it to ‘fill in the gaps’ in each version of the story and to share it as something novel and fun to interact with.

To extend the driving metaphor maybe a little too far, designing video advertising in this way makes it more likely to be users’ online destination than just a potential obstacle in their way.