Interactive images interactive-images

You can easily make static images rich, engaging experiences for customers by dragging and dropping “shoppable” hotspots onto an image. Shoppable hotspots combine additional information about a product or service with a direct, point-of-sale “Add to cart” or “Buy” capability. Customers can select these hotspots that link directly to the product or service, add it to a shopping cart, or be linked to a web page. Direct experiences such as these increase customer engagement and conversions on your web site.

The following is a shoppable banner with a Quickview pop-up window. A user activates the Quickview by tapping the circle or “hotspot” on the model.

See interactive images in action on the web page pictured above.

Watch how interactive image banners are created watch-how-interactive-image-banners-are-created

Watch a walkthrough on how interactive image banners are created (10 minutes and 33 seconds). You also learn how to preview, edit, and deliver interactive image banners.

Quick Start: Interactive Images quick-start-interactive-images

The following step-by-step workflow description is designed to help you get up and running quickly with interactive images in Adobe Experience Manager Assets.

Look for the Example heading within some of the Quick Start tasks. It contains a brief tutorial that is based on a web page example that does not yet have Interactive Images added to it.

The tutorial helps to illustrate the steps of integrating interactive images on your own website.

Interactive Images steps:

(Optional) Identify hotspot variables optional-identifying-hotspot-variables

Start by identifying dynamic variables used by your existing Quickview implementation so that you can enter hotspot data to create the interactive image.

When you add hotspots to a banner image in Experience Manager Assets, assign a SKU (Stock Keeping Unit). The SKU is a unique identifier for each distinct product or service that you offer. And, add any extra optional variables to each hotspot. Such hotspot variables are used later to match hotspots with Quickview content.

It is important to properly identify the number and type of variables to associate with hotspot data. Each hotspot added to a banner image must carry enough information to unambiguously identify the product in the existing backend system.

There are different ways to identify a set of variables to use for hotspot data.

Sometimes it is enough to consult with IT specialists responsible for the existing Quickview implementation. Such people are likely to know what is the minimum set of data required to identify Quickview in the system. However, it is also possible to simply analyze the existing behavior of the front-end code.

Most Quickview implementations use the following paradigm:

The approach then is to visit different areas of the existing website where the Quickview feature is implemented. Then trigger the Quickview and acquire the Ajax URL sent by web page for loading the Quickview data or content.

Normally there is no need for you to use any specialized debugging tools. Modern web browsers feature web inspectors that do an adequate job. The following are a few examples of web browsers that include web inspectors:

When network monitoring is turned on in the browser, trigger the Quickview on the page.

Now find the Quickview Ajax URL in the network log and copy the recorded URL for future analysis. Usually when you trigger the Quickview there are numerous requests that are sent out to the server. Typically, the Quickview Ajax URL is one of the first in the list. It has either a complex query string portion or path, and its response MIME type is either text/html, text/xml, or text/javascript.

During this process, it is important to visit different areas of your website, with different product categories and types. The reason is that Quickview URLs can have parts that are common for a given website category. However, they change only if you visit a different area of the website.

In the simplest case, the only variable part in the Quickview URL is the product SKU. In this case, the SKU value is the only data piece that you need for adding hotspots to the banner image.

However, in complex cases, the Quickview URL has different varying elements in addition to the SKU. For example, varying elements could include category ID, color code, and size code. In such cases, every element is a separate variable in your hotspot data definition in the shoppable interactive image feature in Experience Manager Assets.

Consider the following examples of Quickview URLs and their resulting hotspot variables:

Example

You can apply the same approach used in the three examples above to the demo web page.

The demo web page has several product thumbnails, each having a Quickview button labeled “See More”. With your web browser’s debugging tool still activated, select each button and note the recorded Quickview URLs. After you activate all four product Quick views available on the page, you have the following list of Quickview requests made to the backend:

Looking at the server calls, you can see that product-specific information is only present in the request path. You also notice that the query string is not used at all and there are two distinct types of data pieces involved:

Given this information, the entire Quickview URL has the following pattern:

/datafeed/$categoryId$-$SKU$.json

Based on such analysis, you would use categoryId and SKU for hotspots.

You are now ready to upload an image banner and add hotspots to it using the shoppable interactive image feature in Experience Manager Assets.

(Optional) Create an Interactive Image viewer preset optional-creating-an-interactive-image-viewer-preset

You can choose to use the default, out-of-the-box Interactive Image viewer preset called Shoppable_Banner that comes with Experience Manager Assets. Or you can create your own custom viewer preset for use with interactive images.

When you create a custom Interactive Image viewer preset, you can determine the look of hotspots on the image banner. As part of the creation of the viewer preset, you can choose to use a hotspot graphic from a gallery of pre-defined images.

After you save the viewer preset, it is automatically activated (turned on) on the Viewer Preset list page in Experience Manager Assets. This functionality means that it is visible in the Interactive Media component and whenever you view an asset. However, to deliver an interactive banner with this viewer preset, publish your viewer preset as well. This rule is true for custom or out-of-box viewer presets.

To create an Interactive Image viewer preset:

Upload an image banner uploading-an-image-banner

If you have already uploaded the images that you want to use, advance to the next step, Adding hotspots to an image banner.

To upload an image banner:

Add hotspots to an image banner adding-hotspots-to-an-image-banner

You can add hotspots to an image banner using the editor on the Hotspot Management page.

When you add hotspots, you can define them as a Quickview pop-up display, as a hyperlink, or an Experience Fragment.

See Experience Fragments.

Undo and Redo options, near the upper-right corner of the page, are supported during your current creation/editing session.

When you finish creating your interactive image, you can use Preview to see a representation of how your interactive image appears to customers.

See (Optional) Preview interactive images.

To add hotspots to an image banner:

(Optional) Preview interactive images optional-previewing-interactive-images

You can use Preview to see a representation of how your interactive image appears to customers. Preview also lets you test the image’s hotspots to ensure they behave as expected.

When you are satisfied with the interactive image, you can publish it.
See Embed the Video or Image Viewer on a Web Page.
See Link URLs to your web application. The URL-based method of linking is not possible if your interactive content has links with relative URLs, particularly links to Experience Manager Sites pages.
See Add Dynamic Media Assets to Pages.

To preview interactive images:

Publish interactive image assets publishing-interactive-image-assets

See Publish Assets for details on how to publish interactive image assets.

Integrate an interactive image with your website integrating-an-interactive-image-with-your-website

After you upload a banner image, add hotspots to it, and publish the interactive image, you are ready to add it to your website page.

If you are an Experience Manager Sites customer, you can add the interactive image by dragging the Interactive Media component onto your page. See Add Dynamic Media Assets to Pages.

If you are a standalone Experience Manager Assets customer, you can manually add the interactive image to your website as described in this section.

Example

Using the demo website as an example, notice that the picture of the three individuals is a static IMG tag:

<img class="img-responsive" width="100%" title="Hero Image 2" alt="Hero Image 2" src="images/shoppable-banner.jpg">

Integration is as simple as removing the IMG tag and replacing it with the copied embed code from Experience Manager Assets. You can see that the result shows the shoppable interactive image on the page with three circle hotspots.

To apply a “crop” to a shoppable interactive image for a responsive environment, include the Interactive Image configuration attribute ZoomView.iscommand to the path. In this case, the ZoomView component is called and iscommand is the “crop” image serving command that you apply.

See ZoomView.iscommand configuration attribute.

See crop image serving command.

You are now ready to integrate the interactive image with an existing Quickview on your website.

Integrate an interactive image with an existing Quickview integrating-an-interactive-image-with-an-existing-quickview

The last step in this process is integrating the interactive image with an existing Quickview implementation on your website. There is no solution to the integration that works for all cases. Every Quickview implementation is unique and a specific approach is needed. As such, involving the assistance of a front-end IT person is helpful.

The existing Quickview implementation normally represents a chain of inter-related actions that happen on the web page in the following order:

These calls do not necessarily represent independent public API calls that are called by the web page logic from an arbitrary step. Instead, it is a chained call where every next step is hidden in the last phase (callback) of the previous step.

When the shoppable interactive image is replacing step 1, and partially step 2, a user taps a hotspot inside the shoppable image. Such user interaction is handled by the viewer. The viewer returns an event to the web page that contains all the hotspot data previously added to Experience Manager Assets.

In such an event handler, the front-end code does the following:

The embed code returned by Experience Manager Assets has a ready-to-use event handler that is commented out, as seen in the following highlighted code snippet:

        var s7interactiveimageviewer = new s7viewers.InteractiveImage({
            "containerId" : "s7interactiveimage_div",
            "params" : {
                "serverurl" : "https://aodmarketingna.assetsadobe.com/is/image",
                "contenturl" : "https://aodmarketingna.assetsadobe.com/",
                "config" : "/etc/dam/presets/viewer/Shoppable_Media",
                "asset" : "/content/dam/mac/aodmarketingna/shoppable-banner/shoppable-banner.jpg" }
        })
        /* // Example of interactive image event for Quickview.
             s7interactiveimageviewer.setHandlers({
                "quickViewActivate": function(inData) {
                    var sku=inData.sku; //SKU for product ID
                    //To pass other parameter from the hotspot, add custom parameter during the hotspot setup as parameterName=value
                    loadQuickView(sku); //Replace this call with your Quickview plugin
                    //See your Quickviewer plugin for the Quickview call
                 },
             });
        */
        s7interactiveimageviewer.init();

So, it is only necessary to uncomment the code and replace the dummy handler body with the code that is specific to the particular web page.

The process of constructing the Quickview URL is opposite of the process used for identifying hotspot variables covered earlier.

See Identify hotspot variables.

Using the previous Quickview URL examples, you can see in the following examples, how the Quickview URL is constructed in each case:

The last step to trigger the Quickview URL and activate the Quickview panel requires the assistance of a front-end IT person from your work. They have the knowledge to know best how to accurately trigger the Quickview implementation from the proper step, having a ready-to-use Quickview URL.

You can see how these steps are applied to the demo website to fully integrate a shoppable interactive image with the Quickview code. Earlier, the structure of the Quickview URL was identified as the following:

/datafeed/$categoryId$-$SKU$.json

To reconstruct this URL inside the quickViewActivate handler, you can use the categoryId and SKU fields. These fields are available in the inData object that is passed to the handler by the viewer’s code:

var sku=inData.sku;
var categoryId=inData.categoryId;
var quickViewUrl = "datafeed/" + categoryId + "-" + sku + ".json";

The demo website is triggering the Quickview dialog box using a simple loadQuickView() function call. This function takes only one argument, which is the Quickview data URL. As such, the last step to integrate the shoppable interactive image is to add the following line of code to the quickViewActivate handler:

loadQuickView(quickViewUrl);

The following is the complete source code:

 var s7interactiveimageviewer = new s7viewers.InteractiveImage({
  "containerId" : "s7interactiveimage_div",
  "params" : {
   "serverurl" : "https://aodmarketingna.assetsadobe.com/is/image",
   "contenturl" : "https://aodmarketingna.assetsadobe.com/",
   "config" : "/etc/dam/presets/viewer/Shoppable_Media",
   "asset" : "/content/dam/mac/aodmarketingna/shoppable-banner/shoppable-banner.jpg" }
 })
   s7interactiveimageviewer.setHandlers({
   "quickViewActivate": function(inData) {
     var sku=inData.sku;
     var categoryId=inData.categoryId;
    var quickViewUrl = "datafeed/" + categoryId + "-" + sku + ".json";
    loadQuickView(quickViewUrl);
    },
   });
 s7interactiveimageviewer.init();

The final demo website with the fully integrated interactive image.

Create custom pop-ups using Quickview using-quickviews-to-create-custom-pop-ups

See Create custom pop-up Windows® using Quickview.