Editorial notes
Notes on interactive product design
We build interfaces you can measure. These articles explain the field in plain terms for people commissioning interactive digital products — or working alongside a team that is building one.
What is here
An index, kept as a bench note
The interactive digital product field is crowded with borrowed terminology. Whether you are commissioning a configurator, testing a WebGL product view, or reading a pitch for a branching narrative, the words matter — because the budget, the build effort and the way you measure success differ sharply between a form and an experience.
Every piece below is written the way a studio brief is written: what the term actually means, where it works, what it costs to build, and where it stops being worth the money. Longer pieces cover the emerging spatial interfaces being built in Brussels and across Belgium and Europe. Read in order, or jump to the topic you need.
Seam 01
Touchscreen interface, Brussels. Read the piece on prototyping to understand why this hardware sat behind glass for six weeks.
Definition
What an interactive experience is, and what it is not
The term gets used loosely. An interactive experience is a digital product where the user's actions change what happens next, and the change matters to the outcome. A form that submits is not an interactive experience — it is a form. A configurator that redraws a product, a narrative that branches, an installation that responds to movement: these are.
The distinction matters commercially, because the budget for the two is different, and so is the way you measure whether it worked. An interactive experience review has to ask: does the change the user makes actually alter the outcome in a way that matters? If not, the interface is decorative.
Interactive, actually
- A configurator that redraws the product as the buyer changes it
- A narrative that breaks into distinct paths based on what the viewer chose
- An installation that responds to movement in the room
Frequently labelled as such, but not
- A contact form that submits
- A carousel the visitor can swipe
- A video the visitor presses play on
Storytelling
Branching narrative, after Bandersnatch
Netflix's Bandersnatch made viewer choice a mainstream feature rather than an experiment. What changed for everyone else was expectation: audiences now understand that digital video can branch, and they look for the choice.
For brand and editorial work, the hard part is not the branching technology. It is keeping the paths coherent when a viewer takes a different route through the story than the writer anticipated.
We cover how that is structured as a graph rather than a script — where each junction is defined by what the viewer needs to still know on arriving there — and where the format stops being worth the cost.
A branching piece is five to ten times the editorial work of a linear one, and the review meetings are attended by people who have never seen the piece side by side with the piece itself.
Where it earns its keep
A real decision the audience actually cares about, with consequences they can see before the piece ends.
Where it does not
Any choice that only changes the colour of the ending, or a path a viewer cannot tell apart from the last one.
What to fix in the pitch
Ask for a path map before signing anything — the story that survives the third branch is the story worth making.
Seam 02
A configurator rig, mid-test. The customer sees a product; the studio sees the eight states it can land in.
Browser 3D
WebGL and the return of 3D in the browser
WebGL runs three-dimensional scenes inside a normal page, with no installation and no headset. That constraint is also its advantage: the audience for a 3D product view is everyone with a browser, not everyone willing to download a plugin.
Product views
A single object, viewed from every angle, with real material and lighting read in the browser at under one second per camera move.
Configurators
The buyer changes material, trim or colour and sees the change rendered, not swapped as a photograph. Read as a real-time surface, not a sprite.
Spatial navigation
A space you move through to find parts of a product — where the destination is a viewpoint, not a page. Suits showrooms and complex assemblies.
Weak on long scenes and low-end devices
A single view runs everywhere. A five-minute narrative through a heavy 3D world does not — the phone on the third-generation handset in the room is the limit, not the idea.
The reconciliation
In practice, a static GLB or GLTF pipeline with a mesh budget and a scene-graph that drops what the visitor cannot see. The article walks the numbers and the fallback path for older browsers.
Engagement
Why gamification works when the product is a habit
Progress mechanics, streaks and rewards appear across learning apps and beyond. The mechanic only works when there is something worth returning to.
A streak in a language-learning app keeps the visitor coming back to lessons that accumulate. The same mechanic bolted to a newsletter, or a survey, produces the opposite — a visitor who feels nagged, not rewarded.
We look at engagement loops, where they help, and where they turn a product into a chore. We also look at the metric side — retention at day 30, day 90 — and why a loop that spikes day-one numbers often flattens by day-thirty.
The takeaway is not that gamification works or does not. It is that the loop has to attach to the actual value the product delivers.
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Progress is a habit, not a receipt
A progress bar that fills once is not a loop. A progress bar that wants one more small step tomorrow is.
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Rewards the visitor did not earn read as noise
A daily bonus for opening the app teaches the visitor to open the app and leave, which is the opposite of what the reward was supposed to do.
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The exit has to be honest
A streak that punishes a visitor for skipping a day is a mechanic that optimizes for guilt. Better to design the loop so returning after a break is still possible.
Seam 03
The whole bench, cleared and lit. Every piece of work goes back to zero when it leaves this room.
Product discovery
Interactive 3D in product discovery
A customer deciding on a product they cannot touch relies on photographs and imagination. Interactive 3D closes part of that gap, and configurators close more of it by letting the customer change the thing they are looking at.
Belgium has specialist platforms offering 3D product experiences with built-in commerce, and retailers increasingly expect the capability. This article is about when the investment makes sense and what the catalogue has to look like for it to pay off.
Two things decide the return. First, the catalogue has to be narrow enough that the same 3D approach works across most of it — a single platform for sofas and a single platform for shoes are different builds. Second, the product has to have a real dimension question that a photograph cannot answer: the size of a corner, the way a fabric folds, the shadow of a leg in a room.
Editorial data
Data storytelling: when the interface does the interpreting
A dataset is not a story. Turning one into the other is an editorial job: deciding what the reader should understand first, second and third, and building an interface that carries that sequence.
A dashboard
Answers every question at once. Suits an operator who already knows what they are looking for and wants to move around it quickly.
A narrative
Answers in an order. Suits a reader who is arriving cold and needs to understand the shape of the finding before they can size the detail.
The overlap
The strongest public work does both: an opinionated opening sequence that eventually hands the reader the dashboard, once they have earned the questions to ask.
The article looks at public-sector and corporate examples — from European statistical agencies through to the annual-report work that has quietly become a designed product category of its own.
It also looks at why explainability has become a requirement rather than a nice-to-have in public communication, and at the interface patterns that carry it without losing the reader in the first ten seconds.
Learning products
Exploration-first interfaces in education
Guided exploration, of the kind Google Earth Voyager uses to turn geography into a narrative journey, holds attention differently from a linear lesson. The user is moving through the material rather than receiving it.
That posture changes how the interface is judged. A linear lesson succeeds when the visitor reaches the end. An exploration succeeds when the visitor can find their own route through the material — and the design has to assume they will.
This piece examines where exploration works in learning products, where it does not, and what it costs to build compared with a straightforward course structure.
In our experience, the cost is not in the technology. It is in the editorial: a designer has to author a map that is interesting when walked in three different orders, and that means more writing, more review, and less reuse of a single script.
Where the two postures split
Linear lesson
One path, one author, one review pass. Cheaper to build and cheaper to update — the trade-off is attention and curiosity.
Exploration-first
Multiple entry points, multiple exits, and a designer who has to test the shape more than the copy. Expensive, and worth it when the subject is spatial.
The consistent answer
Prototyping, and why it keeps being the answer
Nearly every article here comes back to the same practical advice: build something small and testable before committing to the full product. It is cheaper, it surfaces disagreement earlier, and it gives stakeholders something concrete to react to.
The advice sounds obvious. The reason it keeps being repeated is that it keeps being skipped — usually because someone on the commissioning side is confident they know what the finished product looks like, and the prototype would only confirm what they already believe.
Step two — Test
A test where five to eight people use the shape without help from a member of the team. The point is not to gather opinions — it is to watch where they hesitate, and to write the hesitation down as a defect rather than a preference.
- — five to eight real sessions, scheduled and recorded
- — hesitation written down as a defect, not an opinion
- — one clear change to make or one clear reason not to
Step three — Decide
The test produces a decision, not a compliment. Either the shape is approved with a specific change list, or the shape is shelved with the reason recorded. Both outcomes are cheaper than discovering the second during the full build.
- — one written decision, with its reason
- — a change list the build team can execute
- — a shelved shape is a result, not a failure
What a prototype should not contain: a full navigational system, a finished visual language, or a content model. Those come after the decision.
Keep reading or write to us
Bring a topic from this page to the studio
If one of these pieces maps to something you are commissioning, or a question you are trying to answer, we are happy to talk it through. We work with clients across Belgium and the rest of Europe on interactive digital products — web and mobile applications, immersive 3D work, and data storytelling.
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