Abstract:
Look beyond “easy to use” and explore how
to design products that deliver an experience that is
relevant to customers, connects with your organization’s
values, and provides competitive advantage — in
other words, your brand. We'll discuss “brand experience
design” and will practice techniques that augment
standard methods to extend the influence of usability.
Learning objectives:
Participants will learn concepts about brand that demonstrate
its connections with usability and interface design. We
will explore why designing for the “customer experience”
may fall short, even though it’s an important step
beyond designing for “ease of use”. Through
hands-on practice, participants will learn tools and techniques
they can begin to apply in their own usability work —
for discovering users’ expectations of a brand,
for determining if features and functions support the
brand, and for assessing the impact on brand of a particular
product or website design.
How tutorial will be
conducted:
The instructors will spend about half the tutorial presenting
material and encouraging questions from the participants.
The remaining time is spent in hands-on exercises and
discussion, which are spread throughout the tutorial to
balance theory with practice. We will use products (things
you can touch) and visuals (things you can see) to exemplify
the ideas and promote participation.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF MATERIAL
Introduction
The instructors introduce themselves and review the tutorial’s
goals, learning objectives, and agenda. We solicit up-front
issues, questions, and “things I really want to
learn” from the participants and record them on
a flipchart to ensure they are addressed in the tutorial.
Setting the Stage
A discussion in which we explore the role of usability
in the experience that people have with products. The
instructors share a model of “brand experience design”
that begins to illustrate the link between usability and
branding.
Brand and Experience
To fully explore the link between brand and usability,
we must understand the meaning of “brand”.
Also, for us to build good working relationships with
the marketing professionals in our organizations, we need
to be comfortable with their terminology. Topics covered
here include:
- What is brand?
- Why do businesses build brand?
>
- Why design brand “experiences”?
Exercise: The instructors introduce
a tool called “Family of Brands”. This is
a projective technique for discovering what expectations
people have of a brand and how they differentiate brands
in the same market category. Participants will form
small groups and conduct the exercise together on popular
brand names from specific categories (such as automobiles
and athletic footwear).
Designing for Brand
As our discussions have now shown, brand can have tangible
effects and is, therefore, something we can explicitly
design for. Here the instructors talk about introducing
brand as a project requirement — as distinct from
the more familiar functional, business, and usage requirements.
This idea is illustrated with examples from client work.
Exercise: In this discussion, the
instructors introduce a heuristic called the “brand
ladder”. This heuristic allows us to model connections
between product features and the values of people and
organizations, helping us to identify whether a usability
problem is creating a disconnect with the brand. In
groups, participants will practice building brand ladders
for the product features of a well-known brand.
Extending the Usability Test
This section introduces a variety of projective techniques
that participants can use to gather insight on people’s
expectations, attitudes, beliefs, and actual experiences
with a brand. Some of the techniques we discuss include
thought bubbles, word association, product transformation,
obituary, and photo collage. The instructors discuss how
these techniques can be applied in a usability setting
to gather insights beyond ease of use, to discover the
meaning that people assign to their experience with a
product or website.
Exercise: In groups, participants will use the photo sort
technique to take before and after snapshots of their
expectations and experience with a particular brand. This
approach of “bookending” a usability test
can reveal information that would not normally surface,
in a manner that is often compelling to executives in
an organization. This exercise encourages hands-on activity
with a product outside the tutorial room.
Bringing it Home
The tutorial concludes with some final thoughts and advice
from the instructors on how to implement these new practices
to extend the influence of usability and build relationships
with marketing. Participants are encouraged to ask questions
and discuss their thoughts on “brand experience
design”.
Instructor’s Biographies
Robert Barlow-Busch has been designing
software and web applications and advocating usability
engineering for about 12 years. This work has taken
him throughout North America and Europe and includes
familiar names such as Sony and FedEx. Today, Robert
is a senior advisor in Interaction Design at Quarry
Integrated Communications. In this role, he directs
projects and develops practices for Quarry’s Design
Builder methodology — a UCD-inspired approach
to design that connects people, products, and brand.
Robert has lectured at several universities and presented
at conferences for UPA, IHM-HCI, and IBM.
Diana Wiffen is a six-year veteran
of Quarry and a leader in usability assessments, interaction
design, brand experience, and information architecture
— demonstrating that she’s not only great
at what she does, but she’s passionate about it
too! Diana offers a unique blend of client relationship
smarts, interaction design savvy, and big-picture thinking
to clients and peers in usability engineering. Her client
list includes FedEx, HP, Sprint, and Hoffmann-La Roche.
Diana is a seasoned presenter, leading tutorials at
UPA conferences, IBM, and the University of Toronto.
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