How to Exploit Branding to ensure Usable Products

At this month's UK UPA meeting, usability's relationship to brand management came under scrutiny with guest speakers from Canada's Quarry Integrated Communications.

Robert Barlow-Busch from the Interaction Design Group, and QIC partner Glen Drummond, defined brand experience as 'an event that modifies a brand's meaning in a person's mind'. Then they gave an account of why customers' brand experience is important to the long-term viability of companies and why concentrating on good customer experience alone can put a company out of business. Speaking to an audience that often has a battle to convince the marketing department of the business value of a product that can be used, their opening got a mixed reaction: many in the audience asking themselves how far concern with experience, rather than performance, was really appropriate within usability.

Members of the audience gave first hand illustrations of the tension between these different interest groups. A designer talked of the inflexible demands made by information architects that constrained his ability to meet style requirements, while a usability professional from another organisation spoke of his department's inability to make any impact on the design, regardless of their findings.

But the presenters argued that the 'ease of use' of, for instance, a corporate website might be a core attribute of its products' branding, and should anyway underpin any experience overlaid upon it. 'Usability is the cost of entry,' Barlow-Busch said, upon which customer experience and brand experience are built. 'Could it also be the differentiator between similar products?' he asked. And having convinced the audience that the interface between marketing and usability work need not be a site of major conflict, they gave a lively introduction to the overlap in working methods that both teams might exploit.

Suggesting that some attitudinal research be undertaken well before and then just after product testing, they gave illustrations of some projective techniques that they work with:
* thought bubbles – users annotate a picture showing a product use scenario;
* sentence completion – much as above;
* product transformation – eg. 'if this phone were a car, what kind of car would it be?'
* obituary – if the company died, how would it be described?
* photo collage – assemble images that describe the sense of the product/company;
* brand families – give a range of brands in a market as a series of logos and see which (extended) family members users attribute to which logo.
Information gathered in these ways would not compromise the performance testing, but would enhance the team's understanding of users' behaviour.

At first, the audience saw the worth of asking marketing type questions of users who had been recruited to test performance as all one-way: work undertaken by the usability department to the benefit of the marketing department. However, Barlow-Busch pointed out that there was benefit in finding out while testing: 'Does this product merely stink, or is it a brand disconnect?', in other words, does this person have a problem with this product because they hate the values of the product, colouring their experience of using it?

And the benefits looked more symmetrical when Barlow-Busch argued that offering wider information about experience made the rest of the company sit up and listen. Drummond suggested that piping a few minutes of 'rich material', such as user interviews, to the chief executive would be more effective at making a point than any number of reports.

While it is frustrating that usability findings are not sought out and treasured, these presenters are not alone in suggesting that a good understanding of and close association with the company's revenue-generating aspects can only benefit the profession... or that presenting the information usably is important. And the argument that using a product successfully is part of building its brand experience is strong support for usable products.

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