Designs of The Week: The Best Interactive Website Designs

By guest authors Charles W. Bush and Kathy Hwang of 3Strand Innovation, a brand, design and business consultancy

The following websites seem to have bottled the “magic” surprise factors of curiosity, intimacy, humor or shock. They are some of our favorite examples of how strong an impact you can have on your customers by paying close attention to how you design their experience with your website. Surprise is one of the hardest components to add to design, but our philosophy at 3Strand is that this particular ingredient can make the difference between a website that is just another place that’s trying to sell something and a website that gets passed around virally from friend to friend. Plus, we think these sites are just plain fun and geeky.

Becks Beer
Becks encourages you to explore and peek through its doors into some of the most intimate questions and thoughts posted by Becks fans. Choose your answer and find out how “normal” your choices are…well, that is, compared with those crazy German beer drinkers out there.

Hotel 626
This is a no-nonsense, frightening site. If you scare easily, do not enter! You can only enter the hotel from 6pm to 6am and you’re immediately thrown into an haunted hotel game that’s a bite-sized horror movie experience. Hotel 626 was released as part of Doritos Snack Strong Productions, though no one is sure how it has anything to do with Doritos (unless you’re as scared by the health factor of their chips as we are).

HBO Voyeur
This is the future of entertainment! HBO outdid itself in finding the right balance between the entertainment provided by modern television, the rich visuals of silent movies and the engagement and freedom of website navigation. If Becks allows you to glimpse into other people’s thoughts, HBO Voyeur does something similar by letting you peak into other people’s windows. HBO breaks new ground as it introduces you to a fictional but still voyeuristic New York. The site is full of stories about heartbreak and impossible victories and stories that just have quirky humor. Best of all, the site leaves you with questions. Lots of questions! It’s for the inner voyeur in all of us. It’s hard to say how expensive the production is, but the production value is INCREDIBLE. On this site you are given interesting neighbors and free reign to shamelessly watch the juicy bits of their lives around you.

Don’t Click It!
Is this the future of website interaction? No clicks. No buttons. Just simple movements with the pointer to get you from information point A to B. The site is a lot of fun and is thought-provoking, as it suggests what can be done when you think a little outside of the traditional website design box.

Turbochef
“It dices, it slices, it makes every meal perfect!” Okay, so the guy on this site does sounds a bit like an infomercial, but the visual information and flash animation is as professional as we have seen. If you peek into the oven, you will see the designers use large and clear graphics to break down the complicated engineering behind this “unbelievable” machine into a mix of quick animations and still design. We are starting to see a lot people green-screened into websites these days to explain a company’s product or service. Look at this example to see how to bridge new ways to use video with the familiar graphics of web design.

With all the potential for websites to become more interactive in the next few years, enjoy and have fun!

This segment is a part in the series : Designs of The Week