Homosapien-ing Interfaces
I am all about branding. I think it is one of those things we don’t talk enough about in product design. I see a lot of talk about creating delightful experiences for users and how to invoke positive feelings throughout user journeys, but not enough talk about how delight is part of a good brand. A user’s experience is an extension of your Brand. Products themselves are extensions of a brand. Just like a logo is or the messaging we use in our marketing.
A brand is not what you say you are but what your users say you are. It is what they feel when your name comes up. What you say you are is called Marketing.
I have a cool technique I use with my clients to define a brand identity. I pull a chair up in front of them and ask them to picture their product or brand as if it was a person. I ask them to write down what this person is wearing, where their feet are, how is s/he sitting, what is s/he drinking, does s/he have an accent? Quirks and any mannerisms? What are their goals and aspirations? etc. I ask them to be very detailed because I am looking for how this person is making them feel and how they want other people to feel when they meet him/her. I get a really good idea of what the brand identity should be and can come up with basic things like colors, typography, voice and tone and other things just from this exercise alone.
You can try this technique with your favorite products. Next time you interact with a digital interface, try picturing it as a person — you are involved in a dialogue with a machine after all. The machine is responding to your input and reacting to it, helping you get a task done. So, as cheesy as it sounds, humanize the interface. Are you understanding them? Are you feeling like they care about you and your needs? How are you feeling? Really… how are you feeling? Write it down.
I got this idea from watching the Apple’s Get a Mac Marketing campaign that ran from 2006 to 2009. It portrayed Mac-s and PC-s in a human form. It’s brilliant because if someone had asked me to describe a PC as a person at the time, I would have probably have imagined someone like John Hodgman as the PC.
The exercise is even more helpful if you have set of products under one unique brand. Look at Google for example. They have literally hundreds of products. Yet most of them feel like they are part of the same family as if they had the same parents. That is because almost all of them are under one design system, Material Design. Because of the system, a user moving fluidly through multiple Google products can feel like they are dialoguing with a very big family instead of individual people. This is one of the reasons why I love Design Systems and being able to materialize a brand identity through code.
The Age of Emotional Consumerism
We live in a society where we are information-rich and time-poor.
We value how products and services make us feel more than what features they have or whether or not they are the best product for us. Effective branding through carefully crafted brand identities is why you value feelings over features… Does Apple make the best computers in the world? Does Nike make the best sneakers? Probably, I don’t know for certain. But I do know how these brands make me feel… Another example is canopy.co. I rather use them instead of Amazon, even though I can find the same items directly on Amazon. Both products solve the same problem in different ways but I value how Canopy.co makes me feel over Amazon judging solely on the experience I get when using them.
So, if you are a product designer working on a product, new or old, humanize it. Use this exercise with your users and extract all the characteristics they declare and share your findings with your team and your Marketing department. You will be surprised by what you find. Let me know how it went!
Remember, a product or interface is an extension of a brand. Treat it as such.
If you like Branding as much as I do, check out this book by Marty Neumeier — Brand Gap. A brilliant book on this subject.
