.brands Spotlight: signtime.apple

We’ve long talked about dotbrands being a foundation for innovation for organizations that are seeking to break the mould and finding ways to bring content to life.

And just like that, Apple does what it is famous for – creating an incredible tool that provides a new service for one-on-one sign language interpreting for shopping and support assistance for customers – this time on a simple and memorable .brand domain signtime.apple.

Why do we like this so much?

Firstly, irrespective of the domain, this service is simply amazing, helping people with hearing difficulties communicate with AppleCare and other retail customer services by using American Sign Language (ASL) in the USA, British Sign Language (BSL) in the United Kingdom and French Sign Language (LSF) in France through their web browsers.

Customers visiting Apple Stores in those countries can use SignTime to remotely access a sign language interpreter without booking one ahead of time.

In their May announcement, the company advised their customers that they were releasing;

We think that’s super cool.

From a .brand top-level domain perspective however, it just gets better and better.

Apple have been relatively modest in their efforts with .apple to date, registering 30 domains in the .apple extension since it’s launch in 2016. This includes some of the sites we have reviewed previously on makeway.world such as applemusicforbusiness.apple and newsroom.apple (ironically where we found this signtime.apple announcement too!).

They have used a mix of redirects to broader sites and microsites with .apple but the fact that this lives on its own simple and memorable domain works brilliantly as this is exactly the sort of ‘non-core’ content that a .brand can bring to life when avoiding long and uninspiring domain structures off apple.com which is already an incredible complex domain to manage in and of itself.

This appears to be part of Apple’s journey into providing assistance for people with disabilities as it is promising additional services for the hearing and visually challenged later this year.

But for now, we simply say bravo! This is exactly what .brands should be all about and we can’t wait to see what’s next from Apple.

GoDaddy acquired Neustar's registry business as of August 3, 2020.