The Neon Ocean
Along with rebranding from Synaesthetic to aloom, we’ve revised our website: welcome to The Neon Ocean, a new kind of immersive site that users can swim through in layers.
It is small to start, but still effective in communicating our bold, simple-on-the-surface experiences that have unbound depth. Once you take the plunge, we invite you to just sit on a page and breath, we promise no widgets will pop up to attack you.. these glowing depths are a space to meditate on ideas and act mindfully — we won’t distract you with 20 buttons to choose from.
The goal of our new site is to achieve coherence: to communicate our unique vision and offering to our customers from the get-go. To feed people’s imaginations on how we can make multimedia experiences more immersive and engaging, in practical manners that don’t require users to buy expensive and limiting headsets, make large behavior changes, or do anything else that is high-friction or inaccessible.
Our approach is always a first-principles one: instead of focusing on complex animations, stunning wireframes, or widgets within widgets — we just put ourselves in our users’ shoes. Any good product developer will tell you to listen to the customer and focus on feedback, but very few dive into the value of empathy in this process.
You can talk to a thousand people without learning enough if you aren’t actively listening to their emotions. You must do more than acknowledge issues in a mechanical way of “oh yes, I could imagine having to wait for X or not having the option to Y is inconvenient”, but going a step further to understand the more basic context of the person’s bad experience and the roots of their pain-points.
Being able to sense impatience, or effectively the bandwidth constraints in the user’s attention at every given instance of their customer journey is critical to tailoring an interaction for them. Often a flashy hook can pull someone in, but being able to offer substance in digestible proportions after that is a challenge — that separates companies like Apple from the rest. Coherence in your engagement with users is key to success because it builds trust. It builds trust by quickly, clearly, and reliably communicating who and what you are to strangers, and by helping them feel good. It’s similar to interacting with another person — if the person’s words, actions, and appearance are contradictory, you will have a harder time trusting them and don’t feel as comfortable in ultimately participating in whatever it is that they want.
In this same way, product or UX design is similar; the cliché phrase of “put yourself in their shoes” is really about feeling what your customer feels, and empathizing with them. So what did we feel from our audience when we did this for our new site?
We felt distraction, urgency, boredom, and skepticism. Overwhelmed by information (let alone data), we aren’t immune to having a backlog of thoughts to process and not absorbing new content well. “Who is this now?” “What do they want?” “Where is this going?” these are common thoughts that frame the UX of people who visit our site or hear about us for the first time. To keep it simple, what we want is to take a step back, breathe, and just feel more.
You are sitting in your corner of the world, staring at a small piece of highly processed sand, trying to pick up signs that help you connect on some level with another group of people thousands of miles away. Let alone the technical wonders of this practice on its own, on a cognitive level we confine ourselves to a 2D digital screen world, and often lose track of the 3D world it is based in.
If we are lucky enough to have you visit our site, we want you to feel what’s actually going on — you are being sucked into our ecosystem from far, far away and plunging into our ideas, emotions and products. This mysterious space is filled with vibrant lights that illuminate unique content with strong emotions. This ecosystem is still shrouded in a lot of darkness, but more will be unveiled as we grow.
Come take a dip, the water is warm.
