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Brand and the Online Designer

One of two things usually happens when you design an online presence or service: you create a new brand or extend a new one. Both are tough challenges. But extending an existing brand, especially if it's well-known, global in scope, or highly regarded, is a tough proposition.

Many call this process brand stewardship; for a designer, this is an apt phrase. You've just entered a minefield of hard design problems, highly political discussions, and sweating the microscopic details of your client's online presence. Your client is like the cautious dad who, hands shaking, hands you the keys to the car for the first time.

Now, if you're a talented creative problem solver, this is familiar territory, broadly speaking: It's a big design problem waiting to be solved. If you're a user-centric designer, all the better; you understand that good user experience is critical (and, in fact, my assumption is that most readers here do not need a primer on user-centric design). But great designers deeply involve themselves with their clients' business and brand to make even stronger design decisions.

Know the Brand

Before diving into the designer's understanding of a client's business, let me throw down my own take on brand to get us all on the same wavelength.

• Brand is the emotional character a consumer places on a product or service and those who create or offer it, so brand may exist for both product lines and companies.
• Brand is the emotional glue between company and consumer, and defines both customer loyalty and company legitimacy to customers.
• A brand communicates best not by simply describing a product or service, but by speaking between the lines of packaging, advertising, marketing and the actual product or service itself.
• If the business is a purely digital online business, the user experience is the brand.

Being the steward of a brand online means that your first order of business is to assess the existing brand. Request a big brand download meeting from your client, wholly for your benefit, and follow up with as many detailed questions as you can. Get a list of brand descriptor words of the client's brand against which you can judge your own work.

As you go through your design process, stay engaged with the brand. Always be prepared to back up major design decisions with how they benefit the brand. Never be afraid to ask if what you're doing is on-brand. Be thoroughly Darwinian in culling out off-brand design concepts, wording, colors, and visual elements. Let the brand determine interacton and even motion design (you'll be shocked how easy - and crucial - this is). These are just a few ways to successfully translate, extend or refresh a brand online.

Now...on to winning the hearts of the beancounters and executives.

Know the Business

At the end of the day, your client needs to make more money. Never forget this.

If it's an online retailer, sales need to increase. If it's a university, top-notch enrollment (and the associated tuition) needs to increase. If it's a non-profit, donations need to increase. All of this boils down to you, as a designer, adding value by having your beautiful work ultimately lead to an increased flow of dough, even if that's not your explicitly-assigned goal.

This should not change how you execute your work. It should, however, serve as a reminder to keep your eyes open to your clients' ultimate needs. The client expects your work to perform in some way, as that's how they will justify investing in your services.

What does this have to do with brand stewardship? Everything. Brand, as discussed above, is the emotive bond between company and customer, between customer and product. Perserving, enhancing or extending brand is all about constant reinforcement of this bond. Not understanding what the company's value proposition and offerings to their customers is to design in ignorance of this relationship, with potentially poor results for your client's business.

We make products for extreme athletes, and we wanted to increase the number of items in their shopping cart per order. Why does your web design force us to show less merchandise per page, which prevents us from effectively cross-selling add-ons for our snowboards? Yeah. Good luck in that meeting.

To avoid designing yourself into an uninformed corner, ask your client what their success metrics are for your project, and if you have the experience, help them assess these goals. Learn how the company's main stakeholders assess the company's performance (usually through Key Performance Indicators, or KPI's). Will design alone increase sales 25% for the company's most loyal customers? In conjunction with a broader corporate identity redesign and marketing campaign, that could be achievable. Will a website redesign reduce shopping cart abandonment or site exit statistics by 10%? If it includes an eye towards usability and findability, that's probably a reasonable goal. If you're an online designer, there are plenty of online resources to demystify these terms and concepts.

As you might gather, it's no mistake that many of the most experienced commercial designers (even those who primarily do print work) have evolved into mighty impressive business consultants at the same time. This knowledge of their clients' business is inherently part of their success.

By way of example, I've been on projects where our design team successfully doubled customer conversion rates; is that because our design is just that good? That's only part of it. Our success was directly tied to the time we took, as designers, to understand their business as it existed today, so that we could help to chart where it was headed tomorrow.

The more you know about their business, they more they'll trust you, and the better you can design the right solution...and the more often they'll ask you to come back for more work.

Just as your clients can't overlook the value of user experience, designers cannot overlook the value of understanding their clients' business. These two factors meet to form brand, which is what the designer must ultimately both heed and mold, as the project requires. Proper brand stewardship - and truly great user experience design - requires that these three things be factored into every design decision a creative professional makes.