The impression of network liveness

You soon won’t need a homepage anymore, the role of the interface is shifting with multi-platform ecosystems

18 Havas and UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television (TFT) are pursuing their collaboration on the Future of Storytelling project, with a specific focus on the UX Design of major multi-platforms ecosystems (e.g Amazon, WeChat). From voice and language processing to image and video processing, through predictive analytics, all these developments are impacting UX Design and by consequence the media ecosystems brands and consumers are dealing with on a daily basis.

With content ubiquitous, the role of the interface has shifted. It has evolved from providing a portal to massive content catalogs to connecting the right consumers with the right content. The future interface is about minimizing choice and cutting through the clutter to the content consumers are interested in.

As such, the interface is likely to offer a more instant, curated, and customizable content experience. It will run on contextual, local, and personalized data, presented in a visual format. The interface will increasingly become a key service feature for users, mirroring the evolution of digital assistants that leverage growing amounts of data to deliver a tailored, highly personalized experience.

That being said, the future of the interface lies beyond the home screen/homepage, which means near-total data-driven recommendations for the developers and brands. Thus, a contextual, curated programming feed will replace the home screen/homepage. Here, contextual data capabilities and AI will deepen UX design personalization to minimize search and maximize engagement time.

In this future interface for example, Netflix will start playing the right content the user wants right as the streaming app launches, Snapchat would present stories in the right order for maximum time engagement, etc. This new interface would also sync the content experience across all devices for a consistent and seamless user experience. In other words, you don’t need a home screen/homepage interface if a user stays within the same platform ecosystem.

As industry consolidation continues, there is likely to be more investment among media companies to combine multiple services in order to keep users on their platforms. For instance, Netflix releases full seasons of shows at once and without delay, auto-play ensures that there are no breaks between individual episodes, and the opening credits can be skipped. This ensures that it is more difficult to get off the platform than to stay on and keep watching. Facebook is also trying to create a similar “binge” experience to Netflix by relying on live streams, autoplay features, and mobile push notifications to phones to keep the impression of network liveness at the forefront of its users’ attentions.

It also makes it easier to integrate advertisements and sponsored content in between “stories”, which offers a more seamless ad/content experience. As such, ecosystem management through ongoing media consolidation will grow to achieve competitive scale and drive cross-platform expansion.

Community platforms like Twitch are focused around content experience whereas social platforms like Facebook derive value from social interactions around multiple topics. Thus, the potential for super-app ecosystems appears ripe as we increasingly see the development and cooption of social media platform functions by competitors (see: Instagram/Facebook v. Snapchat “live Stories”; also, see Twitter NFL Live Streams v. Amazon’s NFL Live Streams).

The success of WeChat as a super-app among Chinese users supports the notion regarding the possibility of a similar ecosystem evolving in the US. WeChat’s reliance on QR codes also suggests the potential for AR-type technology to keep users engaged and loyal to a single super-app. The increasing number of shoppable posts on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Pinterest also keep users on the platforms while expanding the platform’s ecosystem, so users can seamlessly transition through different activities without leaving the ecosystem.