What’s Coming After the Screen Era?

They are small, popular and practical: Airpods are the best example of the fact that graphic displays are no longer absolutely necessary for interactions between people and machines. If you take the headphones out of your ear, playback stops, if you put them back in, it continues. Additional functions such as skipping can be used with a double tap. Extremely useful functions are housed on the limited surface area.

In addition to haptic communication, voice and gesture controls are also spreading rapidly: smoke detectors or lamps can be switched off with gestures, Siri or Alexa assist with voice input, and infotainment systems in the vehicle also react to touch and words. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the car recognizes its driver: even inside the aisle, automatically opens the doors and greets them with individual interior lighting. In the future, looks should also be able to control the vehicle – thanks to eye tracking.

The possibilities for interaction are becoming more and more diverse and the entries on graphic displays rank ahead of them. We are already at the beginning of the post-screen era. It is important to explore the new forms of connection between brands and people today. The challenge will be to develop these new approaches effectively for your own brand. It won’t be a sure-fire success, because a brand creates experiences during the interaction – sometimes even magical ones. In order for this to work, a few prerequisites must be met:

Establishing new ways of interacting with a brand only works when the expertise of a wide variety of disciplines comes together: From data analysis to software development to industrial design, specialists work together to develop a strategy and solutions. And that requires interdisciplinary work and superordinate organizational processes.

With regard to new opportunities for interaction, decision-makers should view their brand as a service: What does the brand enable its users to do? What is their benefit? Is your own brand designed in such a way that it can also be further developed?

So that interaction options do not come to nothing, the respective worlds of customers, products and services have to merge with one another. It depends on the context of use and the usage situation: In which situation does it happen, in which environment, in which technical ecosystem? What tasks need to be done, what is the goal? Only when both sides – the product and the user world – are superimposed can corresponding products with a high degree of usability be developed that fit the brand and create impressive experiences. Interactions that have already been introduced must always be checked for real customer benefits and optimized.

Since eye tracking, voice, gesture or touch control are technical interfaces, the development times must also be taken into account. New hardware requires a number of process steps: from problem framing to the idea, design and the actual development work to production. The entire process usually takes a year and a half – or more. Software development, on the other hand, is faster. It usually takes four months plus X to find a new solution. If a brand wants to integrate new technologies and software into its products or environments, it is important to consider these production cycles.

The services of the future include automated actions that happen very close to the operation. For example, automatic calendar entries could resolve scheduling conflicts at the same time. However, this interaction is very individual and personal, because users want to decide for themselves whether their reservation in the restaurant or a birthday taking place at the same time has priority – and not leave that to a computer. Brand managers should therefore pay attention to a few things:

• Instead of patronizing consumers, a discreet approach and empathy are required.
• Unclear options are a deterrent. Brands must not confuse users by offering them any type of interaction. The new option must be relevant, target-oriented and appropriate for actors at the given point in time or in the respective environment.
• Companies should not educate their users about the new connections, but act as advisors and rather give them tips and advice.
• Even if we love automation and like to let things happen as if by magic – one thing must not happen under any circumstances: to relieve the user of all decisions. There must always be a chance to manually overwrite the automation.

So it’s not just about creating new interfaces between brands and people. Rather, it is important to shape your relationship with a product or a brand.

It’s about offering customers a personalized and unique brand experience in the right place and at the right time through new interactions. That takes passion, creativity and innovation. This is the only way for brands to build an emotional relationship with their consumers: internally and retain them in the long term.