Make it Interactive!
After sifting through countless travel sites and being directed to quick PDF mockups of hiking, surfing, and all things outdoors, I’m left disappointed, with a hint of bleh. For a travel brochure looking to entice…why are they often so bland and static. I thought, there must be a better way; a way to convey the sense of excitement, danger, and freedom that travel allows. Why do we rely on static PDF replicas of print brochures when we could be using tools like Apple Ibooks, Mag+, and even Hype. My team and I decided that we should try to remedy this. So we brainstormed and came up with an Ibooks digital pamphlet idea on the Hawaiian Islands that would excite and engage the user. This was my team’s first time using Ibooks. This was our process.
Purpose & Team
We decided that we wanted to set the book up focusing on 3 islands, each with approximately 4 spreads, so we would then each have responsibility for one island and collaborate on the title and subsidiary pages. For this project we had to compile mostly on one person’s MacBook. We were able to meet up to work on our 4 individual pages, and then we would send this editable Ibooks author file to Jordan (our Photoshop whiz) and she was able to seamlessly incorporate our other pages in. Since we divided up the work we each had different contributions that I feel make the project really come together. Maisie (our editing artiste) did a great job editing all of our main intro videos. We then placed them into Ibooks without audio, added on a nice title text, and even some light slow motion effects. I think these videos really gave the project a tropical atmospheric mood. Jordan put in a lot of work copy and pasting everything over on her personal MacBook as well as created the Hype map at the very beginning of our island pages, which turned out looking really great. I focused on looking through Bookery.com to find a way to incorporate some interesting widgets for my pages. I decided to include a reveal game for a popular restaurant in Maui, and then a Google maps widget that would link the map to the location of this restaurant.
Strategy
My personal goal with this was to be able to take part in a project where we could create a guide or a vacation pamphlet that would get the user excited about traveling, while being much more immersive than just a plain paper tour-guide pamphlet. I wanted to look into what features we could add to make the experience more immersive and fun for the reader. I was able to find a little reveal game where the user could scratch or reveal a hidden image of a popular fish market restaurant.
The other feature I found was the Google Maps widget where it was able to take the user to the exact location of the fish market on the island and give the user a sense of perspective and it would also let them explore a little more on the map.
We all chose our own background images for our individual islands. I chose to pick images that were all close-up images to then allow for video content and picture/media galleries that could be placed on top of those images, and the background image would not be distracting. We also decided with all of our images it would be beneficial to go into Photoshop and just darken all the background images to give a uniform feel to the entire project.
Sketches
We had quite a few sketches of what we wanted the layout to be and what we wanted to include. Originally we wanted to open the entire project up with a interactive map that would link the reader directly to the pages they wanted to get to, however that was not something realistic for Ibooks so we want back and had to re-work things.
We knew that we wanted to still have an island per person and about 4 spreads for island. So form there we decided to break those spreads into categories, we came up with the topics that we thought would interest people visiting Hawaii; an island highlight, hiking, popular beaches, and food. We knew that we wanted to definitely include some sort of interactive map, fun features/widgets, pop-overs, and a tons of beautiful pictures showing off popular beaches and hiking locations.
Testing & Conclusion
Our testing on the Ipad pro went very well. All pop overs, media galleries and other features and widgets were very effective and brought a sense of movement and action to the content. I do wish we would have had an easier time getting those intro videos in for each island, however Ibooks did not have a super intuitive way of turning an entire screen into a video that could play in the background on a loop.
Other than that our pages seemed very clean a with lots of spacing and really eye-catching images of the islands, which was our goal from the very beginning of the project.
Overall we were really pleased with the end results, and we were able to at least get a taste of the endless possibilities that are available with software like Ibooks; to increase user interactivity and engage interest in this kind of travel content. It sure beats a boring PDF.
Christian Mercado is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction Design. This article relates to the “Immersive Ibooks” project in the DGM 2260 course and is representative of the skills learned.
