Brand 101 Quick Summary: Understanding your brand means knowing who you are, what you stand for, and how you want to be perceived. While you may not have total control over what people think of your business, you can certainly impact those perceptions. However, in order to impact perceptions, it is critical that you have taken the time to understand your core brand identity, promise, and have it organized in a manner that will lend to consistency in messaging.
User Experience 101 Quick Summary: Focusing on your customers’ needs and truly putting yourself in the shoes of your customer when making UX decisions is critical. What motivates them? What are they looking for? Why are they leaving? User experience is a way to better understand your customers. Through heat mapping, bounce rates, etc. you can actually test your user experience to make informed decisions that will back design enhancements, technology integrations, and marketing budgets.
Brand Promise 101
Connecting the dots
Building the bridge between your brand promise and authentic user experiences is imperative. A company will suffer online if they are solely focused on the brand alone and the same goes for a company with tunnel vision on user experience. It is not enough to simply rely on the brand identity created by the brand promise as that is 100% brand centered without taking into account the user experience and feedback. The key here is to work research and strategy phases into your design process prior to the actual design.
Spice it up
Once the research is complete on both a brand and user perspective, the design can come to life. There – you’ve successfully created a brand image that is ready to present to the public. What next? It’s time to start refining that and gaining more insights on your users… It’s time to take those relationships to the next level! As traffic begins to flow, so too should testing to gain further analytical insights on your users.
Always improving
Through various testing methods informed by the brand promise, you are then able to start gaining data and more information about your visitors… How long are they staying on the pages? How are they finding you? Are they able to navigate through the site seamlessly? All of this can be found through digital strategy and user experience methods. The point is, you will forever be deepening your understanding of your users—there should be a constant curiosity about them as your customers are forever evolving and changing.
