“That’s not one of our corporate colors." You try to explain that, yes, the corporate colors are black and gold, but that combination may not be optimal for building the main menu of a website.
It seems like designers have a love / hate relationship with branding documents and style guides. After all, it’s nice to have a defined style and brand manual. Accepted colors, approved iconography, exhaustively documented gradients and image libraries all make life easier for designers. They cut down on revisions and give us a place to start working. Unfortunately, most corporate style guides are not created with interactive experiences in mind.
Unless you are lucky enough to be working for a company that was born digital, you’re likely to be faced with a lot of branding requirements that were created for the print world, not the digital realm.
When corporate marketing departments dream of brand design, they only dream as far as they need. The expensive and time consuming process of extending the brand into an interactive concept is usually pushed off until it becomes absolutely necessary.
By the time some serious rethinking is required, a lot of people have gotten stuck in the mud of static branding. It’s completely natural for companies to resist straying from the handful of predefined styles that were never meant to address web forms, widgets, calendars and menuing systems.
Whose fault is it really?
As designers and user experience and interface professionals, it’s easy to blame faceless corporate bureaucracy. It’s management’s fault; they don’t think about users. It’s marketing’s fault; they don’t understand the difference between a brochure and a web site. It’s the art department’s fault; they didn’t explain the difference between print experience and multimedia experience. At the end of the day it is our job and responsibility.
There are a lot of designers and user experience architects who are happy to go with the flow and let marketing dictate the terms of the design. If a poorly dictated design ends up crippling the user experience, well, that’s not their fault. But in this world blame has a way of trickling down to the people closest to the project. Who’s going to take the bullet? The marketing director who oversaw the project, or the worker in charge of actually executing it?
Fault doesn’t matter. Responsibility does. At the end of the day, as user experience professionals, it is our responsibility to advocate on behalf of the user. That means we have to be champions of the user experience, and sometimes that means going against the status quo.
User experience IS your brand
Of all the arguments for modifying brand attributes to better suit a digital experience, the most compelling is this: The way users feel about their experience is inseparable from the way they feel about your brand.
This maxim holds true for brick-and-mortar experiences as well as for digital interactions. A restaurant with great food but incredibly long lines and a bad wait staff will experience brand damage (think by association). If the user experience is bad, people will look elsewhere simple as that. The same thing will happen if your users get baffled by confusing menus, hard-to-read text, and perplexing layouts. The user experience is bad, and people will look elsewhere.
The way a user feels when they come in contact with a brand interaction point will implicitly shape their image of the brand itself. This realization is a powerful tool for user experience professionals and can help snap clients and peers out of static thinking.