As a company, we’ve spent the last year clearly defining our work and services.
We didn’t quite fit into a marketing bucket anymore as our work had evolved to include more design around people and their experiences with our clients. What we landed on is Brand Experience Design – a term that, to us, includes three key ingredients that make up every successful brand: People, Purpose, and Product/Service.
How We Got Here
Brand Experience Design speaks to our desire to help organizations design and build powerful human experiences. Brand is not just a logo and tagline, we believe it is the sum of both your internal (employee) and external (audiences) experiences. The best companies are intentional about their brand from the moment a new customer walks in the door or a new hire first sits down at their desk. Our work is to partner with these organizations and help them design these powerful moments and interactions.
Yes, these organizations want to grow their revenue and profit, but they are also driven by a more powerful mission – they want to change the world. Maybe it’s a local change, such as improving the lives of the less fortunate in their community. Maybe it’s a national or global goal, such as making education accessible for all. Maybe they are nonprofit, maybe for-profit. It doesn’t matter.
We seek out mission-driven organizations that are intent on improving the world we all share.
Okay, but practically speaking, what exactly is Brand Experience Design? How is it different from marketing? To us, our marketing work was very tactical, completed behind a desk, connectionless, and mostly uninspiring. We were missing the human element. As a result, we began working differently, thinking of our work as a means of breaking down barriers and fueling conversations in order to understand first, and solve second. We dug for real answers from real audiences, we mapped their actual journeys, helped them tell their stories, and worked alongside our clients to engage all of their people to build better solutions from this feedback. We explored the ins and outs of unique interactions and what defined the many variables. We found that marketing is just a very small part of the larger picture, and could not be effectively done without knowing what that larger picture looked like.
Over the past year, we have hosted several workshops for businesses and organizations throughout the Midwest who see the potential in implementing a human-centered design approach into their work and culture. People often appreciate the process, but have a hard time understanding how to incorporate it into their daily tasks once they leave. Participants often ask, “Is there a guide that will tell me when to use each of the methods?”
The answer is, not really.
The good news? There are many research options to get started and working examples of how different methods have yielded data towards solving specific problem spaces, but ultimately, there’s no prescriptive guide for when to use methods. This might sound like a cop-out but the reasoning lies at the core of human-centered design––it all comes back to your unique audience needs.
There are standard methods to choose from like interviews, surveys, mapping, observations and card sorting, but we encourage people to embrace the methodology. Don’t feel constrained by the methods you know––iterate, customize, gamify––whatever you need to do to relate to your audience and give and receive valuable input. Know that you may need to adjust and adapt on the fly, that’s okay! That’s part of the process. Try not to get caught up in forcing a method if it is not working. If interviews or surveys are not producing the data you need, reassess. Find out what’s missing and what you need to move forward. You may include analogous observations or immersing yourself in a particular environment to get more helpful information.
Part of the design process is coming up with a method that will best relate to your audience in a way that will get you the information you need. For example, if you need to customize messages to specific audiences, you may want to interview folks and build out personas. While this means methods are customized for every problem space, there are some common things to think about:
- What is it that you want to learn?
- How many different audience types will you need to interact with?
- How does your audience best communicate?
- Are you able to have direct communication with them or do you need to explore appropriate indirect methods?
- How can you relate the experience to something familiar and comfortable for them?
- What are the limitations of the intended method?
- How much time or budget is available?
The most important thing to remember is to empathize with the people whose problem you’re striving to solve. Explore different methods, practice them with friends or co-workers to build out techniques and applications, and adapt them to work for you.