As part of our continuing effort to test, improve and update our interactive print resources and tools, we have made a significant upgrade to our calls-to-action.

Download the refreshed Layar Call-to-Action Pack, including the Layar Logo and the all new Call-to-Action Guidelines.

Our research and experience have shown that proper calls-to-action are imperative to the success of an interactive print campaign. Alerting your users through descriptive and explanatory calls-to-action is, more often than not, more important than the overall quality of the digital content. After all, if users don’t know about your content, it doesn’t matter how great it is!

Thanks to over 40,000 Creator editors publishing campaigns, popular interactive print titles reaching millions of homes monthly, over 30 million Layar App users and sophisticated analytics, we have a unique vantage point from which to observe how users are consuming interactive print.

Based on our observations, we have identified the most effective calls-to-action. Therefore, we have reviewed, user-tested and redesigned our calls-to- action to better provide you with the most efficient ways to make your campaigns more apparent to your users.

The Call-to-Action Guidelines are part of our goal to unify calls-to-action across campaigns to educate new interactive print users while providing a seamless experience.

As augmented reality and interactive print continue to grow, it is becoming clear that many more people now understand that a whole new world is emerging. We now have designers and engineers specifically working on AR projects, and with that comes and increasing amount of theory and best practices for AR user experience.

We recently saw this article by UX Magazine about augmented reality and user experience and we noticed how it related to interactive print in some places. In the article, authors Olli Siebelt and Michael Marina provide some starting guidelines for thinking about user experience when developing augmented reality experiences.

Consider Context
They mention first to categorize and plan your project based on the intended use case, and the same can be said for developing an interactive print campaign with Layar. 

It is important to consider differences in context when enhancing a magazine page versus and billboard ad or product packaging. The experience needs to feel natural to users, and what feels natural will vary between these different scenarios.

Real World Testing
Another tip – to go out and test in the real world before creating your project – can also be translated to interactive print campaigns. It was important for Layar Partner Limebizz to know the environment in which one of its latest campaigns would be displayed.

The bright orange mystery crate displayed in Antwerp’s central station was a very unique use of interactive print for users. Instead of holding a magazine in their hand, they were standing amidst a busy train station with varying lighting throughout the day. The results were terrific!

Design for Mobile
And finally, having a eye for design for the small screen is one of the big points made in the AR UX article. This also applies to interactive print. It’s very important that visual assets are easy to view and read on a mobile device, and that any web-based content linked to from your print is mobile-friendly.

See More In Our Guide!
These are just a few of the great tips we provide in our comprehensive Best Practices Guide! Have a look at the steps you can take toward more effective interactive print campaign creation, including:

• Getting started with interactive print
• Best practices for the Layar Creator
• Concepting your campaign
• “Dos and Don’ts” for instruction pages, calls-to-action and more
• Testing your campaign
• Integrating interactive print into your workflow
• And more!

It’s been a few months since we first published our Best Practices Guide for the Layar Creator, and a lot has changed since then! So here we are with a completely refreshed and updated guide filled with loads of new insights from successful interactive print campaigns.

In our new guide, titled Steps to Effective Campaign Creation, you can find lots of great tips to make your next interactive print campaign your best one yet. In the guide you’ll find:

• Getting started with interactive print
• Best practices for the Layar Creator
• Concepting your campaign
• “Dos and Don’ts” for instruction pages, calls-to-action and more
• Testing your campaign
• Integrating interactive print into your workflow
• And more!

We’ve worked very hard to create a friendly guide that should help improve your interactive print campaigns, but let us know if you think anything’s missing or if you have any questions. Just mail georgia@layar.com to get in touch.

Click here to download the all new Best Practices Guide.

Not long ago on the blog we featured HTML Week and the all new HTML-infused LAYARED Magazine. Now we’ve got a great HTML Widget tutorial that shows some of the capabilities of the HTML Widget.

One way to offer readers more content in a single space is to create an HTML Widget with expandable and collapsible content areas. It’s great for adding an FAQ, images or extra product information to your printed pages in a way that’s friendly to users and easy to build.

Follow this link to check out the tutorial and download our example template to build your own!

Here at Layar we are invested in helping publishers create the best experience for their readers in the Layar Creator. Since the augmented reality field is relatively new to most, we’ve created a comprehensive best practices guide for creating engaging, high quality Layar Creator campaigns.

The following set of best practices encompasses the results of user tests, as well as statistics studies on a few Layar Creator campaigns. They are part of an ongoing learning process about user experience in the augmented reality field, with a focus on printed publications. You will find both general and specific recommendations, example images and useful links for more information.

Click here to download Layar’s Best Practices Guide for Layar Creator.

The guide includes:

• Insights on instructions pages (purpose, positioning, design and communication style, etc.).
• Calls to action in print (purpose, positioning, design, copy, the Layar logo, etc.).
• Suggestions regarding digital content (target market, content type, principle, etc.).

We will continue to update this document and warmly welcome your feedback. We are aware that some methods work better for some publications more than others, that is why we kindly ask you to share your experience with us. We would love to hear back from you!

To leave us feedback, contact Georgia Diaconescu at georgia@layar.com.

In a continued effort to help make all interested parties into expert Layar Vision developers, we’re hosting another webinar this Thursday at 5pm Amsterdam time (CEST), this time to provide examples of the best and worst types of reference images.

Join Layar Vision expert Michael Hofmann to make sure you’re choosing the most augmentable reference images possible for your Vision layers. Register now!

In case you weren’t able to attend the Introduction to Layar Vision webinar that King Yiu Chu hosted last Friday, September 9, we posted the audio recording and presentation slides here for download.