Defining Brand Experience

Lately, I’ve been researching the concept of ‘brand experience’. First off, what are we talking about when we intellectualise the notion that we can experience a brand?

According to the clever peeps at Wikipedia:

A brand can take many forms, including a name, sign, symbol, color combination or slogan. The word brand has evolved to encompass identity - it affects the personality of a product, company or service.

Brand experience isn't just the design; it's also the usability of a website, the intuitive functionality of a phone app or the approachability of customer service. Our perception as consumers is formed by how we’re able to interact with a brand.

The web is information tapas; a tasting menu for ideas. The function of a brand website is to provide the building blocks for a user to form an opinion about the brand. It is our internalised perception of a brand that motivates us to endorse it. No matter how convincingly an ad tries to persuade us when it comes to online we are in search of convenient information wrapped within an engaging environment.

So how does a brand create an experience? The answer is to get inside the head of the brand's biggest fan. We are defined by our actions. If the majority of your site’s returning visitors are heading to the same page(s) or entering specific terms into the search box the experience needs to reflect this behaviour. The most important expert on consumer behaviour is your site’s regular visitors. Listen to them by studying their actions.

Another element is the experience is the look and feel. Women tend to view the web as a service; while men typically interpret the web as a tool. How does your website represent both the male and female perspectives?

If a website doesn't live up to our expectations than our preception of the brand can become tarnished. As an example, Nike.com is a flash website that is sleek and stylish, but it doesn’t feel like a shopping website. Whereas, Zappos.com is not half as pretty, but it feels like both a service and a tool to use. If the only way to buy Nike shoes was on Nike.com the experience would need to change. But Nike.com doesn't exist to sell; it exists for fans to experience the brand.

Utilitarian shoppers are interested in e-tailing because of four specific attributes: convenience and accessibility, selection, availability of information and lack of sociality (Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 2001).

Most consumers' online purchase decision is based on their motivation and goals. I don’t think Nike.com exists to sell shoes. I believe it exists to promote the brand. The experience on Nike.com is all about exploration and appreciation of design. This is why it has the ability for users to design their own custom shoes, learn about shoe performance, get training tips and fantasise about how their lives might be different with a pair of Nike’s on their feet.

Compared with conventional utilitarian shopping motivations, the merit of hedonic motivation is experiential and emotional. The reason why hedonic consumers do shopping is not for physical objective but for the shopping process instead. (Huang Jen-Hung and Yang Yi-Chun 2010)

The purpose of the website is just as important as observing user behaviour. Many websites intend to be all things to all people and it’s not possible and could damage the brand.

Nike.com is able to remain focused on its goal of creating a unique brand experience because their products are sold through 3^rd party websites and their own bricks and mortar stores. Nike.com is all about the brand experience and not about buying shoes; however, there are a select few who are motivated by exclusivity and design. These consumers will take the risk of paying more because they are hardcore fans of the brand. But most consumers will look for the best price on eBay, Zappos or some other 3^rd party seller. Nike doesn’t care because the brand website is serving its purpose of engaging with its fans.

Letter to a Client: eCommerce Design Tips

The following is an extract from an email I sent to a client today - I seem to share the same advise over and over, so why not post it with my readers?

...definitely bad etiquette having any sort of media start automatically. A glittery animation makes sense and will draw the eye to the rich content.

In terms of having a tag cloud- I do recommend these. Not only can you optimise more keywords, but most people don't perform searches in search boxes (unless they're conducting a search on Google or Yahoo) because most people lack trust in the internal search to propagate the content they're after (mostly because of semantics- you say tomato I say tamato). A tag cloud negates semantics and helps a user by serving up more ideas for items to look for.

If it comes down to needing to eliminate elements - the main rule of thumb is the bottom line "will this end in a sale?" - content for the sake of content is not more important then merchandise.

Also, in 4-6 months you'll likely want to make a few changes and modify certain elements. The canvas is never complete- there will be plenty of opportunities to make adjustments and refinements. The best way to determine what to keep and what to get rid of is the analytics from user behaviour- we can make all kinds of assumptions about what will have the most impact now, but the best director is consumer behaviour.

Usability Focused SEO Strategies

Recently I had a brief phone call with someone asking me how to ensure a website quickly shows up in the first page of a search engine result. I offered that showing up in organic search can take time, and a fast solution is pay per click. Conducting an entire site overhaul is commonly what it takes to show up in the top results of an organic search. There are also simple tricks to show up in local search results. Geotargeting is an easy way for locals to find you.

Years ago, SEO was an extremely dry concept entailing keyword strategies and primitive analytics as clairvoyant as a Magic Eight Ball. (Anyone who tells you they can read a users’ mind using a heat map is a charlatan.) The answer to a question such as this one is not simple and can’t be summarized without insight into a company’s objectives and core demographic. Also, the truth of the matter is that SEO has far surpassed traditional online marketing and keyword selection. SEO starts with good development strategies and ends with consistent testing. Knowing your user and seeing your site through their eyes is the best way to developing fine-tuned optimization.

To start, knowing that web browsers are the point of entry should help in determining keyword selection. I think it’s a good idea to know what the experience is like in both the latest version and preceding version of Firefox and Internet Explorer. Not only test that your site is efficient and bug-free, but conduct regular outside user testing to gain insight into how users find your website. As an example the Awesome Bar in Firefox slowly adapts to a user’s preferences and offers better fitting matches when entering a URL. Firefox can also tell websites your physical location resulting in more relevant and useful results (for example, getting directions or finding restaurants nearby). Another idea is to consider what languages are most common in specific regions. Certain browsers can translate site copy; however, it's not always perfect and you might want to consider providing translated versions of your site. I recommend using Google Trends for Websites to find out more about keywords based on regional statistics. Knowing what capabilities exist within a browser will help you know how to optimize the user experience and improve SEO.

An important element of SEO development is ensuring your content is properly categorized, labeled, and indexed. Amazon.com is a great example of how to label and index content. The site is consistent with it’s use of titles and descriptions which lends to optimal searching - both internally and externally. Search Engines such as Google dislike Dynamic URLs. Masking dynamic content using URL Rewrite will optimize the pages of your site. Also, creating an XML site map and using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to assist crawlers in locating the important content is an easy and important undertaking. Always remember that content is king, and duplications or sloppy organization can ruin SEO.

Linking and navigation are also vital to improving SEO. The easier it is to get around your site the better the overall experience for everyone - both users and bots. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines clearly states that it is important to ensure there is a clear hierarchy of content and text links. “Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.“ Another vital element is to employ robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines. Using my previous example, Amazon is a great site to model after in terms of it’s use of linkage. Internal links whisk you through near flawless navigation while external links and widgets are fun to use and easy to setup. Amazon’s affiliate program is one of the best I’ve seen and it’s resulting traffic is phenomenal. Amazon’s online presence stems from a quality website and utilization of online partnerships. The more sites that link back to yours means you must be important or at the very least extremely popular.

In conclusion, the whole point to the beautifully simplistic algorithm deployed by leading search engines is to ensure a quality experience for the user. The 1990 attitude of “if you build it they will come” doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. Your website needs to work well, actually know it’s audience, and be setup as a service to the user. All the marketing in the world can't make a site run better and SEO is Web Usability - contrary to what some may believe you can't enhance the experience by adding a blog. The purpose of a quality search experience is to present the user with the information they want to find; not send them to content masquerading as important in a desperate attempt to gain more site traffic. Always ask yourself, "does this have value?" if not loose it and focus on what matters most.

**BTW, Are there any developers out there who know whether the Rudd government decision to mandate online filtering, and to retrofit it to a decentralized network architecture has any ill effect on search?

A Few UX Pet Peeves

Job hunting is perhaps the best way to find lots of badly designed websites. As someone focused on web usability it's hard to overlook poor content strategy.

Here are a few of the biggest mistakes I’ve noticed regarding content hierarchy, poor categorization, and confusing layouts.

1) Everything is in the middle of the page. Upon arriving to a website we have a tendency to look at the centre and then we normally scan the content from left to right (this makes sense considering in using the English language we also read left to right). When a home page is scrunched up into the centre of the page with everything competing for attention the brain has to think too much. And when we have to think too much our experience is usually poor.

An easy way to avoid this is to determine what is the best available service for the user. In the case of a job search it is the tool which allows the user to get quick results. Yahoo! Jobs illustrates this perfectly by placing the search tool in the top left corner and electing a clean palate to demonstrate quickly and easily the hierarchy of content. Another great attribute of of the Yahoo experience is the grouping of similar content. This simple cohesive organizing of content creates value for the user, and ideally elicits registration and regular visits.

2) What am I supposed to be looking at? This is a question you never want a user to ask. When everything is all over the place, and no formal navigation is in sight we have a tendency to loose interest. Solid navigation isn’t reserved for websites only. Blogs also need to think about the audience and their ability to locate specific content. Too often with a popular and well established blog the content takes on a life of it’s own leading to a confusing experience for new users.

When there are links to social media tools and real-time conversations there should be a clear distinction between this and blog posts. The ‘About’ content does not need to be above the fold or even on the main page. I have a tendency to prefer blogs from the likes of Blogger for this very reason. The tools provided allow you to manage content in a clear and concise fashion. We can easily asses who writes the blog, who reads the blog, what tags are associated with the posts, what types of categories exist, badges clearly assert how one can contact the blogger(s) associated with the blog, and a community results from links and a blogroll.

The sense that everything is related is the calling card of a well organized website or blog. I don't think a Home page needs to explain everything at once. To me, the Home page is similar to a thesis statement. A first impression is hard to change and it's really important to be able to illustrate the core attributes of the site in a clear and concise fashion. This also includes pages that take longer then a few seconds to load - I realize that Flash and other cool media stuff makes a site pretty and adds lots of razzle-dazzle, but I don't think any type of media should block or slow-down entry into a website. Let the user control their own experience by providing clearly laid out content and navigation.

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