If you are saying branding requirements and ease of use are sometimes opposed, then that seems a wrong interpretation of usability as the “rule police”, and branding as “visual design”. Usability isn’t a force that opposes branding, just as it doesn’t oppose visual design. Only *bad* usability does that. Branding isn’t about visual design, even though advertising is one of the main vehicles through which branding is achieved.

Visual design in advertising is a tool for creating an experience.

Usability in web design is a tool for creating an experience.

Conveying brand values through the customers’ experience is how you create a brand. Usability is concerned with the customers experience. How could there be a balancing act?

Example: A user needs help information, but the company calls (for brand reasons) its help area Support Center. It takes the user additional time to figure out where help is. The IA needs to weigh whether Support Center is acceptable nomenclature or not.

For me, usability is a set of metrics to measure ease of use. Some of these metrics come from research, some from user testing, some from experience. Usability can suggest courses of action (e.g. putting the global navigation below the fold might not be the best idea), but sometimes the suggested course of action does not fit the brand of the company. The IA needs to negotiate these conflicts.

One of the things that Boo.com and its ilk failed to remember was the importance of understanding. Such project leaders fail to take understanding into consideration. And I think that’s one of the prime roles of the IA/HCI/ID space: to help further understanding within the context of what’s created.

I see branding as the expression of company goals…and yes company goals can conflict with users’ goals. For example, I led the HCI efforts to create a new http://www.siemensmedical.com in 2000. Our user research strongly indicated users did NOT want nor expect a “shop” for multi-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars items. Yet the customer felt that offering eCommerce was a crucial goal. A year after the launch, it was reported to me that only one sale had occurred.

Also, users wanted to be able to compare prices among competitors: how much is this machine and what features does it have, compared with the competition? The client felt that meeting this goal (users wanting to make an informed “buy” decision) violated their goals to protect the sales force and also the corporation’s privacy.

Did the brand suffer? I think so. Could there have been a middle road to meet both users’ and corporate goals? I think so–and I think in almost every case, there is a way to do so…hence the balancing act.

yet in the cases where brand conflicts with users’ mental models and expectations, I feel strongly that the corporation needs to reexamine its brand.

“Design: the interaction between understanding and creation.” ___Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores in “Understanding Computers and Cognition”

Seems to work for me these days. Too often visual designers co-opt the word “design” to mean only graphic, information, and document design. Software, hardware, system, and architectural design also come to mind.

Thanks for saying some things that need to be better understood by the IA/HCI/UX community. Usability isn’t EVERYTHING, it’s a very important and often overlooked aspect of a site/software/whatever.

I’ve found recently that branding is an excellent way to explain the need to focus on user experience. Often when sites have bad usability or IA they are in conflict with their company’s brand strategy. Said another way: if a company values branding, then usability for the sake of branding has value. It’s often much harder to sell usability simply for the sake of usability. Same goes for IA.

You’ve also pointed out that UX/IA can’t just focus on the needs of the user — we also have to consider the needs of the business. Sometimes people forget that — in their desire to be good user advocates they can go too far.

Excellent article!

One helpful mantra from the usability gurus worth stating here is “test it.” Brand consistency can be affirmed by the targeted demographic. And any balancing can be negotiated from there.

Definition 3: To create or contrive for a particular purpose or effect: …

That’s what design means to me. Everything else is just about where and how you apply that activity.

In the privacy and security of my own blog I ranted where I knew I wouldn’t be held to task over what I said – or how I said it.

But now I find, from a suggestion, that I should comment on the piece. I guess, for me, it comes close in areas but falls short of truly showing me how to build brand into structure.

My main areas of conflict of the piece are around the definition of brand/branding/brand equity/brand experience. The lack of attention to the process of building brand into structure and then the superb examples that so simply illustrated the key points, but in an order void of a clear ‘storyline’.

I was left with some solid real-world examples but not the ability to apply Dan’s “building” process to anything else.

Dan lost me when he attempted to disregard most of the books I’ve read on brand to say that they could be summarized to be the essence of the company’s core characteristics. The books I’ve read simply state that a brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, or package design that identifies a product and distinguishes it from others.

However, he had won me over when he attacked Nielsen’s approach to design, as I am sure many took sides immediately. Yet, I was lost again when Dan asked me what were to happen if my brand was void of personality or experience. I thought that was a contradiction of your definition of a brand, Dan?

I guess that was my key area of discomfort, which was to watch Dan explain his real life experiences of brand being translated online, as well as building a brand into an online experience but to have to read how he jumped from discussing a brand as an image or identity and loosely attach equity to the strength of a brand. Brand experience then Branding, then back again…

Dan suggests somewhere, that “Brand should be a component of every decision a company makes…” which is an outstanding statement – perhaps should have been made in bold as I wholeheartedly agree and would have appreciated seeing how business and brand should consider design, especially in the case of building it into structure.

I was looking for the process of design that would capture the way to build brand into design. If design is communicating and being understood, then how does a business translate both its aspirations and the way it behaves, online?

Business and brand are entwined, and perhaps it is with the consideration of the design process, that organizations can better understand how to develop products/services that are consistent and inline with their brand aspirations and current expression.

If I walk into K-Mart and Target, the difference is not simply the brand, it is the experience I have within them. I think that is what K-Mart and Target design, the experience and then everything around that experience that will best be understood as that particular branded experience.

I think the point is about the experience of brand and what simple rules Dan has learnt and picked up to build some of that experience into an online presence. Which is, in some places about branding and identity but they are elements of the experience.

But I could be wrong…