Experience design is not about brands
by petermeYesterday I followed a link from the excellent Putting People First blog to the UK Design Council’s discussion on experience design. Landing on that page, my heart sank, with my first thought being, “for f***’s sake, they’re conflating experience design with brand experience.”
The first sentence reads, “Experience design concentrates on moments of engagement between people and brands, and the memories these moments create.” This is a shameful reduction of the idea of experience design, and a bizarre turn of phrase — people engage with “brands”? I thought they engaged with companies or organizations. This demonstrates the designerspeak that can at times make designers easy to dismiss.
Now, if you read through the pages discussing experience design, there’s a lot of good stuff to take away (or share with your executives, your client, whomever), about holistic and customer-centered relationship models, the importance of an experiential perspective, the value of a cross-disciplinary approaches.
The problem is that “brand” will always be about the impression companies want to make, and are by their nature an ‘inside-out’ proposition — a company figures out its brand and what it means, and does what it can to communicate or otherwise impart that message to people. Brand always starts with the company.
Experience, though, needs to be about the people. What do they want to accomplish, achieve, do? For experience to succeed, it must start with the person, and from there, impress upon the company. “Experience” is outside-in.
The unfortunate company-centeredness of the Design Council’s discussion of brand is in evidence in their 13 examples — most of these are explicit branding ploys, attempts by various companies to impress their brand upon customers through environmental design that suffocates any attempt by customers to express themselves, their desires, what they as people want to accomplish. This isn’t to say that these various examples are “bad” — they might be tons of fun, totally worth the time and money. But if “customer-centric relationship models” are a key element of experience design, what does that have to do with the Guinness Storehouse, “the ultimate experience of the character of Guinness.”
For “experience design” to truly succeed as a discipline, it will need to distinguish itself from brand strategy and design, and demonstrate its distinct value as a contributor to business. Unfortunately, the Design Councils attempt at definition simply muddles things further.
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January 3rd, 2007 at 5:17 am
UK Design Council on user-centred design and experience design
The re-designed website of the UK Design Council features a series of new sections, including some on user-centred design and experience design.
User-centred design
The central premise of user-centred design is that the best-designed products and se…
January 5th, 2007 at 6:07 am
“The problem is that “brand” will always be about the impression companies want to make, and are by their nature an ‘inside-out’ proposition — a company figures out its brand and what it means, and does what it can to communicate or otherwise impart that message to people. Brand always starts with the company.”
Wrong! This is a huge and comon mistake amongst brand novices. A company’s brand is comprised of what the audience at large thinks the company is. This measure must be data driven and include feild research. The brand goal or aspiration, is what the company is hpoing the audience at large will see. The brand is on in a book, or style guide, or the brand managers head. The brand is the reality of the situation - not what the marketing staff is hoping for.
January 5th, 2007 at 6:19 am
Yes, no wonder - its written by Ralph Ardill “founder and CEO of The Brand Experience Consultancy” - Something in the name suggests there might be an emphasis on brands from Ralph.
January 5th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Similar to your frustration, I get frustrated when people say they “design experiences”.
As Mark commented on above, it’s more about what experience users have than what experience you try to give them. If you’re a great designer, they’ll be the same…some of the time.
It’s kind of like commanding the military: you have to see what’s going on “on the ground”. But the ground in this case is the heads of customers.
January 5th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Mark–
While I sympathize with your position, and while most of the “good” marketers I know understand this about brand (and I’ve gotten private emails from some), branding as a practice comes from advertising, and the vast majority of people when thinking about or engaging in brand work think about it as “how do I encourage a particular perception in the marketplace?” and thus it is very inside-out.
I would argue that those who have the idea that “brand is comprised of what the audience at large thinks the company is,” should leave the word “brand” behind (because it’s too muddied), and consider coming on over to experience.
January 5th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Joshua–
I don’t like the phrase “design experiences” either, and didn’t use it. When pressed, I’ll say I design FOR experiences… similar to how my colleague Dan titled his book, Designing for Interaction.
January 7th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
[...] Also, I posted on the AP Blog about how experience design is not about brands, and that conflating them does the notion of customer experience a disservice. [...]
January 7th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
[...] Experience, though, needs to be about the people. What do they want to accomplish, achieve, do? For experience to succeed, it must start with the person, and from there, impress upon the company. “Experience? is outside-in.” By Peter Merholz: Adaptive Path Blog [...]
January 7th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Peter,
I’d distinguish between brand values - how the company/organisation wants to be perceived - and the brand experience, which is how customers actually perceive the organisation as a result of their experiences. When discussing experience design, your brand values might be your target; brand experience is the result in the minds of your audience. The use of ‘brand’ as an aggregate notion is muddied, as you say.
January 8th, 2007 at 1:58 am
[...] Unfortunately the experience design section is strongly brand-focused and therefore company-centric, rather than people-centric, and the write-up is seriously criticised by Peter Merholz, president of Adaptive Path, in a reaction to this post entitled “Experience design is not about brands“: “For ‘experience design’ to truly succeed as a discipline, it will need to distinguish itself from brand strategy and design, and demonstrate its distinct value as a contributor to business. Unfortunately, the Design Councils attempt at definition simply muddles things further.“ [...]
January 8th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Peter…I didn’t mean to imply that you used it…just voicing a frustration that your’s reminded me of.
January 9th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
I’ve been pondering this very topic here for the last several days. Ultimately, the brand is someone’s perception of a company–maybe that someone is the market as a whole, maybe a market segment, maybe an individual. Every experience a person has with a company impacts that person’s perception, so ultimately every experience is a brand experience. In that sense, people actually interact with brands, not with companies. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but bear in mind that one company can have several brands, and several brands (from different companies) may be involved in a single experience. So it’s important to ensure that each experience fits with the intended brand personality.
January 15th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
The great Danish designer Per Mollerup reminds us in his comprehensive book on trademark and brand design, Marks of Excellence (published in 1999, btw, before the “brand experience” became a self-declared profession), “branding” initially was all about putting ownership marks on earthen-ware and cattle. A cup that wouldn’t break or a heifer whose meat tasted good conveyed value on the brand it bore. The potter and farmer didn’t invent their brands, except to decide on the form of the squiggles.
The same pertains today. Designing a “brand experience” (or by extension, a “user experience”) basically means pointing out how well something works. The best way to do that is to give it away or offer testimonials. Truly designing for experience is an act of pure invention. It doesn’t have much to do with products, brands, or websites.
January 25th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
The understanding of “brand” has evolved over the years. When I was in college, “brand” was nothing more than a name and logo or wordmark. Today, we understand that our “brand” can only be defined by how a person perceives us.
Every touch point builds your brand - whether it be a positive or negative perception. The fundemental truth about experience design is that they we can define aspects of an experience and reproduce it. By extension we can learn how interactions with our brand affect how an audience perceives it, and then try to reproduce it in a positive manner. At their roots, brand experience design essentially shares the same process as experience design. It’s semantics, really.
Branding is far more than “advertising” or “pointing out how well something works”. It involves anything and everything that affects how people perceive a product, person, place, idea, etc. It is mulitdisciplinary and far reaching. Look at great brands like Starbucks, the Body Shop, etc. A great brand is built through proper DNA - not just external messaging.
February 7th, 2007 at 2:43 am
Brands Are Inside-Out, User Experience Is Outside-In
“The problem is that “brand” will always be about the impression companies want to make, and are by their nature an ‘inside-out’ proposition — a company figures out its brand and what it means, and does what it can to…
February 8th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
[...] The brand is in a book, in the style guide, or inside the brand managers head. The brand is the reality of the situation - not what the marketing staff is hoping for.“ (Source: comment by Mark Schraad on Peter Merholz blog) [...]
February 9th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
[...] The brand is in a book, in the style guide, or inside the brand managers head. The brand is the reality of the situation - not what the marketing staff is hoping for.“ (Source: comment by Mark Schraad on Peter Merholz blog) [...]
February 15th, 2007 at 3:45 am
[...] Experience design is not about brands [...]
February 15th, 2007 at 4:14 am
Well spoken, Peter. Whatever about external facing sites, I have been trying to create a navigation scheme for and intranet that consists of many separate sites.
In the name of ‘branding’, some of these sites have been ‘rebranded’ with the word ‘my’ stuck on, so we have myCompanyname, myDetails, etc. We also have synecdoches such as myRisks for what used to be Health, Safety and Security. Perhaps this harks back to the practice of branding sheep to indicate that these sheep are my sheep, not someone else’s.
I notice the Design Council has gone down a similar route, with many sections of the site called ‘our’ something or other. It reminds me of the time when everything had to have ‘e-’, ‘i-’, ‘x-’, etc, before them.
February 17th, 2007 at 8:14 am
The idea that brands are about “impressions” is a bit outmoded. It comes from ad agencies, whose job it is to sell impressions. Brands are really quite different. They’re a method to create customers, and as such are expected to deliver strategic value that creates the customers that will drive a business forward.
Brand practice is now being reformulated as a core business activity, with specific deliverables that can advance customers through collaboration and value networks. This is a far cry from top-down brand “messages.” The richness of brands enables these deliverables to be creative, utilitarian, social, political, spiritual, aspirational and whatever else moves the customer forward.
The good news for interaction designers is that they may soon be the new rockstars of brands, reaping the millions that used to go to ad agencies. That’s because brands are interactions:
–Between product and customer
–Between company and customer
–Between customer and customer
–Between the customer today and the new-self that customer wishes to become.
February 18th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
I found this interesting as I’ve used the same research tools (card sorting, cognitive memory studies, sketches, interviews, usability evaluations, competitor reviews) to understand both brands and websites. For example card sorting can be used to inform an information architecture or to understand fuzzy concepts such as brands and customer values.
In both cases, the end goal was to achieve an experience of ‘improved fluency’ for the customer (and sometimes also the organization). With brands, we wanted to choose familiar but memorable names and ‘experiences’ or alternatively opt for brand extensions that fitted with our consumers’ mental models of our products and related experiences. For brands, we researched consumer memory because we knew our customers didn’t think very much about our products.
With websites, we’re often seeking to improve on previous navigation sequences, clarity and service usability so that people achieve their goals and don’t end up deliberating, hesitating or going around in circles. Often, qualitative usability observations are one of our most valuable tools for identifying the common interruptions to what might otherwise have been a ‘fluent online experience’.
In both cases, good experience design is about ‘less effort’ from the perspective of the user. ‘Brand focused’ experience design causes brands to be remembered on cue and more vividly or just ‘implicitly’, making them more familiar or preferable. ‘Service-focused’ experience design is about ease of adoption and ease of interaction due to improved usability.
I don’t think ‘experience design’ is domain specific - it can be about improving a product communication or a more ‘involved’ service interaction. Sometimes the focus will be on engagement whereas other times it will be on interaction dialog.
As the very nature of the relationship between audience and artefact changes so widely from project to project it means that ‘experience design’ can’t just be about a shift of focus to the customer relative to the organization (not that that is ever a bad thing!).
I think ‘experience design’ should be about knowing what level of audience inquiry and insight will work for a given project and understanding how to practically employ findings about memory, habit and behavioral characteristics to shape both identity and service. Experience design is about achieving a balance between the ‘familiarity and liking’ induced fluency of a pleasurable or thought provoking experience and the ‘processing and systematic fluency’ of a logical, conventional, purposeful and consistent design.
The Design Council site lists a design discipline page on Interaction design and a separate discipline page for Experience design. Maybe there’s a distinction to be drawn between designing experiences to stimulate customer thought processes and designing fluent interactions that don’t require you to stop and think.
February 19th, 2007 at 5:37 am
Experience design is about improving emotional fluency and cognitive fluency for the cusotmer by strategically re-shaping interactions with design artefacts. Online, its more difficult to separate out interaction and experience, as the design council have done with their real world identification of design disciplines. The design council examples are outcome case studies rather than strategy case studies and this is why they don’t do the discipline justice - as its more about process.
February 21st, 2007 at 2:59 am
Branding may not directly contribute towards the ‘design of experience’ but it surely influences your perception of the experience. It leaves a psychological impact on us.
Branding is more about bedazzeling the users so that they perceive what is constantly hammered on their minds and ignore what is not experienced in the product. It invokes faith and trust in the name of a company or a product. It can make you blind. (do not take it literally)
You become loyal to a particular brand due to faith. You begin to hesitate in exploring weaker brands. Branding enslaves the user. They find solace in popular brands (though there may be good lot of unbranded products).
Dinesh
–
March 1st, 2007 at 9:46 am
It would be nice if all the researchers out there employing all of these sophisticated analytical tools knew something about the philosophy and/or science of experience. I’m disappointed by how often they believe they’re starting from scratch, when in fact they stand on the shoulders of true giants in the fields of experience and heuristics. It’s the same sort of ignorance that currently clouds the media field.
March 21st, 2007 at 4:53 am
[...] Experience design is not about brands “Experience, though, needs to be about the people. What do they want to accomplish, achieve, do? For experience to succeed, it must start with the person, and from there, impress upon the company. “Experience” is outside-in.” [...]
April 1st, 2008 at 4:35 am
[...] Peter Merholz on why experience design is not about brands. Published Jan 03 2007, 06:53 PM by Robin Grant Filed under: usability and experience design [...]
June 21st, 2008 at 7:26 pm
[...] Experience design is not about brands by Peter Merholz …The unfortunate company-centeredness of the Design Council’s discussion of brand is in evidence in their 13 examples — most of these are explicit branding ploys, attempts by various companies to impress their brand upon customers through environmental design that suffocates any attempt by customers to express themselves, their desires, what they as people want to accomplish. This isn’t to say that these various examples are “bad” — they might be tons of fun, totally worth the time and money. But if “customer-centric relationship models” are a key element of experience design, what does that have to do with the Guinness Storehouse, “the ultimate experience of the character of Guinness.”… [read...] [...]
July 10th, 2008 at 10:21 am
[...] people and brands, and the memories these moments create”. Merholz wrote a succinct and clear response to Ardill’s article. Merholz’s view is that brands work “inside-out”: brand [...]
August 22nd, 2008 at 4:45 am
Good experiences foster emotional connections with other people living the same experience and with the ones that support the experience - a person, a group of people or a brand.
http://www.experiencedesignmanifesto.com
That’s something I wrote based on my thoughts and inspired by UX Week 2008. It’s just a start point for a nice discussion.
Cheers
Andre Braz