One of the strengths of many enterprise tools is their capacity for customization to fit an organization’s specific needs. This includes the ability to reflect a company’s branding through a customized design, with the goal of providing a great user experience.
However, this isn’t necessarily as straightforward as it might seem at first. There are two common mistakes companies make when branding their site. The first is to think it’s as easy as slapping the company logo on what is otherwise basically a stock implementation and considering the branding work to be done.
At the other end of the spectrum, it’s also a mistake to over-engineer a collaboration environment to try to recreate the experience of a public website. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to branding and user experience, but the best path is usually somewhere in the middle.
Branding And The Importance Of Perception
When thinking of branding, don’t just think of applying a color scheme and adding a logo. Brand is everything that reflects the personality of your organization, from your logo to the voice of your content to your design. It’s what you’re trying to project not only to customers, but within the organization as well.
If a company is trying to send the message to employees and customers, for example, that it’s modern and forward-thinking, having outdated furniture will hurt that effort. Similarly, if you have a modern approach to collaboration and put in the work to have great workflows and information design in the collaboration platform, but then have an outdated design, there’s a disconnect between the company culture, the company brand and that tool. That would definitely hurt the user experience and hinder adoption, because the experience would feel alien to what people have come to expect in that company. Branding can be the minority of the work, but it’s often a majority of what people perceive.
User Research For User Experience
Providing a great user experience goes beyond branding. One of the best ways to improve the user experience is to incorporate user research into the design. The project will be driven by top-level business objectives, of course, but user research is the best way to find the gap between how stakeholders think users do their work and how users actually do their work. That gap is often where there are a lot of design opportunities.
User research has an undeserved reputation for being a big, costly undertaking. A small amount of informal research is better than none. It can be as simple as identifying some candidate users within different areas of the company working in different roles and sitting down with them to talk about how they do their work and, ideally, observing them working.
This is the best way to find out if people are, for example, turning to email for document collaboration because of something they don’t like about the way their intranet does document management, or keeping a personal contact list on their desktop because the corporate directory is confusing.
One liability of user research is it can be understood by management as an indication that their insights and goals are being ignored. In fact, though, research often proves to validate the initial assumptions. It’s cheap to ask questions. It’s expensive to design solutions based on incorrect assumptions about how we think people work and find out later that we’re wrong. Intentional, small-scale user research at the beginning of a project doesn’t have to be expensive, and it can have a big benefit for the quality of the end product.
One of the main problems companies face when creating a brand identity is equivocating brand identity with a logo and colors. A brand identity should be understood as the way a person or organization is perceived by their customers. It should influence the tone of their content, their selection of photography and go all the way down to the people they hire. The logo and branding guidelines should serve to represent and reinforce that identity, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for it. If you want to truly understand your brand, first ask “How do I want to be perceived?” Then, interview your customers and users to find out how you truly are perceived. Closing that gap will take more than new fonts and colors.
To thine own self be true — know who you are and how you want to be perceived before deciding on the minutiae of “which shade of warm gray should I choose.” If you have an existing brand, honor it. Make sure that the same adjectives that you’d use to describe your company could be applied to your design choices, tone of copy and photography.
Your five best tips for creating a brand identity:
- Avoid ad-hoc decisions: Ensure that design decisions reinforce your pre-defined brand attributes. If you’re not sure what attributes you’re trying to satisfy, work through Microsoft’s product reaction cards with key stakeholders to help you define the end game.
- Learn what makes good design instead of assuming you have “an eye.” A good starting place would be to familiarize yourself with the Gestalt principles. These are psychological principles that describe how users perceive and organize visual and auditory data.
- Don’t design by committee. Ensure you know the needs and requirements of stakeholders. During a review, instead of asking them to choose between two options, lead a dialogue and ask them to explain which design decisions best satisfy their pre-defined requirements.
- Utilize the Pareto principle to make the most of your and your stakeholders’ time: 80% of a design’s impact will be dictated by 20% of the design decisions you make. This means you can probably stop scrutinizing over the right margin of the supplementary nav.
- Empathize: Ultimately it’s your USERS’ experience that matters, not your personal preference. Familiarize yourself with principles of user-centered design to break out of the rut of “gut reactions.”
Learn more about getting the most out of today’s enterprise technology tools by downloading our free e-book, “7 Keys To Mastering The Digital Workplace.“
