Comments on Building Brand into Structure

Melissa Bradley — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:19 GMT

Dan, thanks for the comments. User scenarios are out, user testing is out, based on “we don’t need it/we can’t afford it”. If I post more I’d probably get canned or have an apoplectic fit, so let’s take this offline. I’ll email you.

Meanwhile, a brief illustration of my job:

1. Signoffs? Mwah-hah-ha!

2. And my design did streamline things, but I was told “We want to force the user to read through all these screens [7 levels!] before they buy, and we don’t want clear navigation, especially back to the home page, because we want them to buy stuff, not go anywhere else.”

Meanwhile, here’s a quote for all IAs in the current economy, courtesy of Percy Bysshe Shelley:

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

-- "Ode to the West Wind"

DanSaffer — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:19 GMT

Dear Melissa, :)

I wish I had some advice for you, but without knowing any specifics about the site or your process, the only thing I can suggest is doing things earlier on that they can ping off of before you get to a stage where you start diagramming.

User Scenarios springs to mind. If you can write up a logical narrative of a user going through the site, and get the brand police to sign off on it, you can use it against them later. If the user experience is presented to them in a story, their lack of expertise might not cloud the issue so much.

If that doesn’t work, after the designs are done and they have had input, you could go back and do another set of User Scenarios. Then you could compare and contrast. (“Here, it takes 5 steps instead of the original 2 I proposed.”)

You might also get a list/diagram from the branding police of (what they think are) the company’s brand values. Then, when you present your designs to them, refer to the diagram to show how each of your decisions reflects those values. Tedious as hell, but if it the difference between a good design and a bad one, might be worth it.

Does anyone do user testing in these days of slashed budgets?

Melissa Bradley — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

Dan,

In my current gig (in-house IA) I and all the designers I work with deal with branding issues daily. I don’t think any of us has a problem with integrating the house brand with user needs.

Our problem (this is turning into a Dear Dan letter, sorry) is the self-styled branding police who, with little design experience and less technical expertise, mandate the brand experience with regard to IA, experience design and functionality. User testing is usually not permitted for various reasons, so there’s no let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may moment where the complications are solved.

What do you do when you are forced to create designs that follow the immediately visible branding issues (color, font, etc) but continually sell out the user by trapping them in sites that confuse, obfuscate, or worse?

Remember, user testing isn’t an option, and the issue tends to be extremely territorial. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this problem and how to deal with it.

alexander — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

To me there seems no real difference beetween Dan´s Focus on branding and Jacob Nielsens focus on information delievery. Both must serve the user who has a certain need for information beacuse the net is a informational place. But information must bee seen not only as a reading that can be delivered via hypertext – a human beeing has some other senses and also an emotional layer that can (and must) be adressed to deliver the message sucessfully.
In designing a web apperance the designer must ask himself (objectively) what he really wants to deliver to his/her (himself/herself unknown) audience. In many cases brand is part of the deliverable – Dan mentioned some examples where a emotional context is part of the message. Sometimes an emotional context is nearly the whole message – why pay thousands of dollars for some little transparent stones ?
But if brand and it´s emotional context is part of the information Jacob Nielsen is also right – what he points out is that the delivery process must be as straightforward as possible – fast, without confusing navigation elements and so on. These guidelines apply for brand elements also. Very often brand guidelines are designed for conventional information carrier and disregard the possibilities and the traps of web design.
So a designer must ask for the whole picture he or she wants to deliver to his/her audience (another point Jacob Nielsen is right on – too often a designer assumes that his/her view of the world in general and his/her knowlegde of the product in special applies to the rest of the world too…) and choose the right combination of brand design (which means of course these little images…) and usability. Like always in real life, things tend to have more than one side…

DanSaffer — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

Couple of comments:

This piece was never meant to be a complete view of brands and branding. I’ll refer you to two books I’ve enjoyed for that: “Marketing Aesthetics” by Schmidtt and Simonson, and “Emotional Branding” by Marc Gobe.

My quick definitions:
Brand=Collection of characteristics surrounding a company or product.
Branding=A physical or digital representation that embodies said characteristics (ie a web site, a brochure, a marketing display).
Brand Experience=What happens when a user/customer encounters the brand through branding.

So, Damien, you and I don’t disagree on this. When you go to K-Mart you are having a brand experience, because you are being exposed to the K-Mart brand via its branding. Try to say that three times fast. :)

I also never meant to imply that ANY brand is devoid of personality. “Utilitarian” is the phrase I used, which is not the same thing. IMHO, a brand without a single personality trait does not exist. Every brand has some characteristic attached to it, even unintentionally.

I was also trying to make aware/remind IAs/IDs about the importance of brand so that they could incorporate it into their design process, not suggest a new process for them to do so. Although I suspect most of us work in a similar fashion (explorations -> task analysis -> site maps -> wire frames -> prototypes -> testing), I’d be uncomfortable suggesting a new process. And because brands are so diverse, I couldn’t say, “For X you need to do Y,” because it is a case-by-case thing, and one of the things that what we, as designers, are being paid to do: translate offline brand to online. The tips at the end of the article were my attempt at giving some approaches to doing that. I’d love to hear more.

damien — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

I’ve read the piece several times. I’m not sure I get it. I understand certain parts, then I trip over the failure to adequately distinguish between brand, branding and brand experience.

In the privacy and security of my own blog I ranted where I knew I wouldn’t be held to task over what I said – or how I said it.

But now I find, from a suggestion, that I should comment on the piece. I guess, for me, it comes close in areas but falls short of truly showing me how to build brand into structure.

My main areas of conflict of the piece are around the definition of brand/branding/brand equity/brand experience. The lack of attention to the process of building brand into structure and then the superb examples that so simply illustrated the key points, but in an order void of a clear ‘storyline’.

I was left with some solid real-world examples but not the ability to apply Dan’s “building” process to anything else.

Dan lost me when he attempted to disregard most of the books I’ve read on brand to say that they could be summarized to be the essence of the company’s core characteristics. The books I’ve read simply state that a brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or package design that identifies a product and distinguishes it from others.

However, he had won me over when he attacked Nielsen’s approach to design, as I am sure many took sides immediately. Yet, I was lost again when Dan asked me what were to happen if my brand was void of personality or experience. I thought that was a contradiction of your definition of a brand, Dan?

I guess that was my key area of discomfort, which was to watch Dan explain his real life experiences of brand being translated online, as well as building a brand into an online experience but to have to read how he jumped from discussing a brand as an image or identity and loosely attach equity to the strength of a brand. Brand experience then Branding, then back again…

Dan suggests somewhere, that “Brand should be a component of every decision a company makes…” which is an outstanding statement – perhaps should have been made in bold as I wholeheartedly agree and would have appreciated seeing how business and brand should consider design, especially in the case of building it into structure.

I was looking for the process of design that would capture the way to build brand into design. If design is communicating and being understood, then how does a business translate both its aspirations and the way it behaves, online?

Business and brand are entwined, and perhaps it is with the consideration of the design process, that organizations can better understand how to develop products/services that are consistent and inline with their brand aspirations and current expression.

If I walk into K-Mart and Target, the difference is not simply the brand, it is the experience I have within them. I think that is what K-Mart and Target design, the experience and then everything around that experience that will best be understood as that particular branded experience.

I think the point is about the experience of brand and what simple rules Dan has learnt and picked up to build some of that experience into an online presence. Which is, in some places about branding and identity but they are elements of the experience.

But I could be wrong…

guru — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

From dictionary.com:
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=design

Definition 3: To create or contrive for a particular purpose or effect: ...

That’s what design means to me. Everything else is just about where and how you apply that activity.

Myra Klarman — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

I have to catch myself from becoming enmeshed in a brand vs. usability debate. Dan’s comments regarding Jakob and usability nearly hooked me.

One helpful mantra from the usability gurus worth stating here is “test it.” Brand consistency can be affirmed by the targeted demographic. And any balancing can be negotiated from there.

Lyle — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

Dan,

Thanks for saying some things that need to be better understood by the IA/HCI/UX community. Usability isn’t EVERYTHING, it’s a very important and often overlooked aspect of a site/software/whatever.

I’ve found recently that branding is an excellent way to explain the need to focus on user experience. Often when sites have bad usability or IA they are in conflict with their company’s brand strategy. Said another way: if a company values branding, then usability for the sake of branding has value. It’s often much harder to sell usability simply for the sake of usability. Same goes for IA.

You’ve also pointed out that UX/IA can’t just focus on the needs of the user—we also have to consider the needs of the business. Sometimes people forget that—in their desire to be good user advocates they can go too far.

Excellent article!

joe — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

Yet another chance to tout my new favorite (older) quotation:

“Design: the interaction between understanding and creation.” ___Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores in “Understanding Computers and Cognition”

Seems to work for me these days. Too often visual designers co-opt the word “design” to mean only graphic, information, and document design. Software, hardware, system, and architectural design also come to mind.

joe — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

I really like the following quotation:
“Design: the interaction between understanding and creation.” ___Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores in “Understanding Computers and Cognition”
Too often we see this appropriation of the word “design” ONLY to mean visual design, graphic design, and information design…and not other forms of design: software design, hardware design, system design, and experience design. The thing I like about the quotation is that it bridges so many gaps.

One of the things that Boo.com and its ilk failed to remember was the importance of understanding. Such project leaders fail to take understanding into consideration. And I think that’s one of the prime roles of the IA/HCI/ID space: to help further understanding within the context of what’s created.

I see branding as the expression of company goals…and yes company goals can conflict with users’ goals. For example, I led the HCI efforts to create a new www.siemensmedical.com in 2000. Our user research strongly indicated users did NOT want nor expect a “shop” for multi-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars items. Yet the customer felt that offering eCommerce was a crucial goal. A year after the launch, it was reported to me that only one sale had occurred.

Also, users wanted to be able to compare prices among competitors: how much is this machine and what features does it have, compared with the competition? The client felt that meeting this goal (users wanting to make an informed “buy” decision) violated their goals to protect the sales force and also the corporation’s privacy.

Did the brand suffer? I think so. Could there have been a middle road to meet both users’ and corporate goals? I think so—and I think in almost every case, there is a way to do so…hence the balancing act.

yet in the cases where brand conflicts with users’ mental models and expectations, I feel strongly that the corporation needs to reexamine its brand.

Andrew — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

Definately a balancing act between branding and usability. How many companies brands promise “ease of use” “predictability” or other Usability goals? For instance, Vodephone’s new brand values include “red” “travel” and “rude”. (Well, ok, it’s Vodaphone for teens.) Certainly it would be a balancing act between creating a site that’s both usable and “rude.”

DanSaffer — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

There’s a balancing act because brand needs are, by definition, part of the company’s needs. The company wants to convey its brand values to the user/customer via the user experience. Sometimes those needs come into conflict with the needs of the user.

Example: A user needs help information, but the company calls (for brand reasons) its help area Support Center. It takes the user additional time to figure out where help is. The IA needs to weigh whether Support Center is acceptable nomenclature or not.

For me, usability is a set of metrics to measure ease of use. Some of these metrics come from research, some from user testing, some from experience. Usability can suggest courses of action (e.g. putting the global navigation below the fold might not be the best idea), but sometimes the suggested course of action does not fit the brand of the company. The IA needs to negotiate these conflicts.

PeterV — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

But nevertheless an excellent articles with some good points. Branding undoubtably works.

PeterV — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:18 GMT

“Of course, there is a balancing act that the IA must perform between the needs of the brand and the needs of the user.”

If you are saying branding requirements and ease of use are sometimes opposed, then that seems a wrong interpretation of usability as the “rule police”, and branding as “visual design”. Usability isn’t a force that opposes branding, just as it doesn’t oppose visual design. Only *bad* usability does that. Branding isn’t about visual design, even though advertising is one of the main vehicles through which branding is achieved.

Visual design in advertising is a tool for creating an experience.

Usability in web design is a tool for creating an experience.

Conveying brand values through the customers’ experience is how you create a brand. Usability is concerned with the customers experience. How could there be a balancing act?