Introducing Surf – Wave’s New Player

Ben Johnson
Updated on 25/03/2022

With Facebook’s re-designed Business Pages going live last month, we thought this would be a good time to adapt our existing player technology for the new visual environment, offering a fresh option for your marketing campaigns.
We’ve teamed up with SocialMediaBox to design and build a new player template called Surf. Surf will be going live for the first time in France with the release of ‘Fastlife’.
With profile and covers photos displaying across your entire Business page, Surf is leaner and leaves out unnecessary artwork. Surf can also turn transparent, allowing either a background image or motion visual to be placed behind the showtimes.
The new ‘flat’ visual experience ensures Surf is in keeping with the latest web design trends, which together with improved icons, social logos, and crisper typography, makes this the best looking player we’ve ever offered.
Surf takes up roughly half the vertical space of other templates, ensuring key elements remain on screen despite Facebook’s changes pushing our content further south. This also has the advantage of further optimising the player for usage on mobile tablet devices, like iPads.
On Mobile, the artwork’s vertical space is smaller, allowing more room to display showtimes. Trailer viewing on mobile has a dedicated button in the upper left hand corner, and sharing icons are arranged horizontally in their own space to avoid the risk they blend into their surroundings. Finally, the display of showtimes has been improved and organised into a grid, with the showtime format displayed within the clickable showtime itself.
Surf’s Timeline is designed to better utilise the small space available in the Newsfeed/Timeline and focusses on the two things that really matter – key content (trailer) and showtimes, with the opening screen now the ‘Postcard’ image Facebook displays in Timeline posts.
To further optimise our player performance, we’ve tweaked Wave Metrics and made certain steps optional in the new player design (such as map display) to reduce the number of user clicks in a bid to boost conversions. Overall, we think that Surf is the most streamlined player on Wave right now, and we’re excited to roll it out and see how it performs.

If you would like to know more CONTACT US

Share this article:
crossmenu