User Experience and Your Brand
February 16, 2011 | Posted by Dan Rigby
As modern browsers, web sites and mobile apps take center stage, it becomes increasingly important to invest time in thoroughly exploring user experience and user interface design not just to create a good looking website but to create a good brand. More often than not, customers are interacting with a brand online first before talking to a sales person. That experience goes a long way to developing the feelings a user associates to a brand.
Many of today's largest and most successful companies are investing heavily in User Experience as a central part of their branding. Apple, Electronic Arts, Google, Nike, Research in Motion and Yahoo are just a few of the big names who are doing it right. For these companies, branding is much more than their logo or their next ad. It's about integrating their core values into everything they do and every experience customers have with their company.
Here are few of our guiding principles we strive to follow:
- Know your user. And that user is probably not you.
- Know your user's goal. Help them get there as quickly as possible.
- Keep it simple. A good user interface stays out of the way and lets you accomplish your goals.
- Have a plan. Wireframes and site maps allow you to explore your options and set your goals without design getting in the way.
- Pay attention to design patterns. Familiarity is important to adoption and creates comfort.
- Know your goals, have a strategy and integrate that through everything you do.
No one sets out to build a site that's unusable. Knowing your objectives, proper planning, trusting the experts and following some simple guidelines will help to prevent a mistake that's not only bad design but bad for branding. It's the experience customers will remember most.