Brand Experience in User Experience Design

Brand Values in Practice

From the work Web designers and other user experience professionals produce, it is clear that they are considering the brands of client organizations during the early conceptual stages of projects. Although their consideration of brand may be either explicit or implicit.

For example, Bang & Olufsen positions itself as a manufacturer of exclusive, premium audio-visual products. Their Web site, shown in Figure 1, reinforces this brand position through the consistent application of these values across all areas of the site’s design and construction:

• its visual presentation of information
• the writing style
• the balance between imagery, text, and whitespace
• clean and simple functional elements
• error-free delivery

The Bose Corporation positions itself as providing “Better sound through research.” This tagline elicits pictures of lab-coat-wearing scientists and engineers diligently producing no-fuss, quality audio equipment, so high quality is critically important on their site. Fortunately, the consistently reliable, error-free operation of their Web site backs up this image, because errors on their site would be exceedingly damaging to the brand experience of site visitors.

While for Bang & Olufsen an error would be an unwelcome distraction and annoyance to visitors, errors on the Bose site—whether spelling, scripting, linking, or server errors—could undo the positive effects of years of brand marketing, successful product development, and high-quality service delivery in the minds of visitors experiencing the problems.

The same could be said for any company that promotes the quality, technical advancements, or safety features of their products. For example, Mitsubishi Australia spent much of 2005 promoting—across all media channels—a new focus on quality and safety in their Australian-built cars. The negative impacts of errors on their site during such a marketing campaign would be enormous.

People expect Web sites to function correctly and without error. It is a baseline requirement for a modern Web site that its functionality should operate properly. Therefore, errors can be damaging to a company’s brand perception in the minds of visitors. The particular brand values of an organization determine the degree to which this damage occurs.

The same premise applies to many aspects of Web site design and development—a site’s interaction design, navigation, the use or absence of Flash animations, and the implementation of rich internet applications versus simple multi-page forms.

For example, Apple.com is the principal online presence for the company that tells us to “Think different”—and yet its Web site is, in many ways, quite conventional. Compare the navigation on the Apple Web site to the taskbar in MacOS X, shown in Figure 2.

The contrast between the two designs is quite marked. While the user interface for MacOS X continues to set the pace for innovations in operating system design, the interaction design on the Apple Web site sends a distinctly different message.

The range of Viera plasma televisions from Panasonic represents the flagship of the company’s technological advancement. The promotional Flash presentation on the Television index for the site announces: “Advanced. Stylish. Personal.” on a Web page that appears to be anything but, as Figure 3 shows.

There is a similar issue with the Panasonic Australia Web site—for which I have some responsibility—because the company has changed its brand image over the past few years. At the time Panasonic was designing and building both their Australian and US sites, they had a much greater focus on reliability and price effectiveness, or value for money, which dictated the focus of our design and development. As a company changes its brand values over time, its online customer experience should also change. Otherwise, a company introduces a disconnect between the expectations of visitors and the actuality of the experience. It is important to understand that customers’ perceptions of a brand should be both positive and consistent with other brand experiences to be truly effective.

Creating Brand Perception

Some would argue that good user research will determine the brand expectations of visitors during the earlier stages of site design, making disconnects between visitors’ expectations and actual experience avoidable. The assumption that customers can meaningfully articulate their expectations vis à vis a corporate Web site’s interaction design is not a reasonable one in my opinion. While learning about the characteristics of various audience segments can inform our choice of interactive elements, user interface design, tone, etcetera, we must balance all of these with the intended brand image and consider the total user experience.

There is a direct connection between customers’ perception of a company’s brand and the brand experience available through all customer-contact points—both online and offline. Defining, then consistently presenting a brand message increases the likelihood that a company can successfully deliver that message.

To ensure that customers perceive our brands as we wish them to, we must first be clear on what our companies’ brand values are. In many organizations, brand values aren’t explicitly stated anywhere. We need to define our real brand values based on our corporate cultures, organizational behavior, service policies, marketing collateral—in other words, the total user experience. Thus, defining brand values and the desired brand experience are important user experience objectives.

By explicitly stating brand experience objectives for a Web site at the commencement of its design phase, we increase our chances of successfully conveying the desired brand perception to the site audience. We can then consciously aim to create that perception when defining the characteristics of a Web site or online service.

As user experience professionals, we have the opportunity to work more closely with brand and marketing specialists to clearly articulate the brand perception we want to elicit from our customers. Brand perception is, in part, an expectation on the part of a customer regarding future interactions with a company and its products and services. To achieve our desired brand perception, we must consistently represent and deliver the brand values we have led customers to expect. 

References

Knemeyer, Dirk. “Brand Experience and the Web.” Digital Web, July 14, 2004. Retrieved July 24, 2006.

Spool, Jared. “Branding and Usability.” User Interface Engineering, January 1, 1996. Retrieved July 24, 2006.