Home Resources Writings & Essays What Is Your User Interface Saying?

What Is Your User Interface Saying?

If you ask any 5 professionals involved in design, development, or marketing of interactive media to define branding you're likely to get 5 distinctly different answers. If you ask each of them how effective the Internet can be at branding you'll likely hear "not very" from at least a few.

There has been a great deal of debate recently about the abilities of the Internet to brand as effectively as television. Some industry experts have put forth the challenge for anyone to turn up web advertising that can move people like television can. They may in fact have a good point. Still, I have found myself immersed in some compelling experiences as I sat glued to my screen, viewing and listening to the latest shocked or flashed site of the day.

At HannaHodge we take a comprehensive approach to developing branding strategies. We believe that a brand's "voice" must be built, maintained, and controlled at "every point of public contact". If you don't define your brand, your competition will! Doing nothing will not yield the status quo.

A common mistake made by many in the industry is their limited view or definition of branding. Branding is big. It's defined by all of the complex relationships your company has with the world. It's going to happen regardless of what you do. The differentiator is whether or not you choose to take control.

While it's clear that a brand is often a company's most valuable asset, it often defies easy characterization and therefore proves to be difficult to quantify in terms of monetary value or ROI. We can say with certainty that a brand is reflected in the people who know, use, and live with it. Thus, we can further define a brand as the sum total of an individual's past, present, and future experiences with a company, it's products, and it's services.

Traditionally, branding has been achieved through repetition, utilizing print, broadcast, or other media to deliver a message to a target market over and over and over until the message becomes second nature. While this method of branding is very effective, it is but one of the many points of public contact.

One of the first questions we often ask our clients is "what is your user interface saying today"? Many businesses are spending millions annually to drive their brand message via traditional methods. Ironically, many are simultaneously working against themselves by subjecting the public to a user interface that is sending a completely different message. There are many ways that a user interface communicates a company's brand. A traditional software product tells its user a great deal about the company that made it. There are of course the surface issues of consistency, consistent use of logos, colors, type, icons, etc. There are also various behavioral properties such as navigational and interaction paradigms and performance. Finally, the most overlooked item on the list of software branding, and perhaps the most important, is usability.

Make no mistake, if your company is delivering a traditional desktop word processing application, a web based e-commerce application for selling books and music, or a content oriented web site for GenXers, the user interface is defining your brand. While designing interactive products to meet user needs and goals is not new from a development perspective, it is new from a branding perspective.

At HannaHodge we recognized some time ago, the importance of a harmonious relationship between usability engineering, design and branding. Usability engineering not only provides the tools to insure that your users' needs are met, it also provides the tools by which many of the other branding characteristics can be measured.

As clients, developers, and marketing professionals become more educated, they will eventually force the usability engineering community to step up and fill this role. Clearly, as many of the differentiators of the past become commodities, those who can manage their brands will prevail in a highly competitive marketplace.