Last week was the end of regular classes. I'm in the middle of Intersession where I'm jamming away on final projects and exams for "A" session before we kick off "B" session next week. Just finished a project for my Portfolio Planning class and was skimming through last week's notes from Cognitive Human Factors where our professor Ken mentioned something pretty interesting that I wrote down. I hadn't really spent much time thinking of this before.
He suggested that User Interface design will start paying more attention to "brand." Now that's interesting and makes total sense. If you or your clients make a list of all your customer touchpoints, which most of us have done often enough, you'll list retail stores, TV spots, brochures, customer service line, web site, etc. That last one, web site, I often left at that. And maybe rightfully so since I dealt in consumer goods on the client and agency sides. But a tech company's UI is a major part of its brand. Think Apple (GUI interface) or Google (search results) or Amazon (product reviews, recommendations).
Are companies maximizing this opportunity? Curious if this is viewed from a branding/marketing standpoint or if that's solely the domain of the engineers and usability test experts.
In a different class I mentioned how my mindmap follows Amazon- and Google-like organizational processes online (it's what I've grown accustomed to and now expect) and how companies offering products online (e.g. travel sites) or offline (e.g. GPS) can use that to their benefit. If nearly everyone and their mother uses those two sites, can you tailor your offerings to use those heuristics to ingratiate yourself, appear familiar and, ultimately, sell more to customers? I don't mean literally ripping off their IP but rather using the cues we've all formed habits around.
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