​Consumerization and the Visual Brand Experience

Our increased reliance on technology has made the need for well-informed and positive digital brand experiences all that more critical. The way an experience looks and feels plays an important role in how people embrace or reject an organization’s brand. If successfully executed, visual design should build trust and evoke a lasting positive memory and connection.

Delivering personality

The foundation of a visual design approach and its application to a user interface (UI) design is built on basic elements, such as color, typography, and spatial relationships. In the digital context, ideas of UI extend beyond static conventions. Subtleties of animation or visual feedback for interactive elements also play a part in the overall visual design. These characteristics, static or active, cascade across digital touch-points, creating an experience that delivers on an organization’s desired brand personality.

Delight in the employee experience

As organizations move toward consumerization inside the enterprise, the employee experience becomes as important as the customer experience. Organizations are seeing the positive business impacts of employee brand advocacy and the importance of nurturing the lasting impressions each interaction has on their employees, just as they would customers. The touch point scenarios of the employee experience are so vast and constant that the impact of a quality UI could be the difference between dissatisfaction and delight. Dimensions — such as service, support, and delight in experience — are what build strong connections between brands and the people they touch.

Balanced approach to new visual contexts

Strong visual continuity between internal and external brand aesthetics, at its foundation, is a must for brand stability and alignment across touch-points, but the different needs of the employee experience can extend brand conventions beyond existing guidelines.

Inside the enterprise solutions cater to unique experiences that differ from those found in external-facing solutions. They lift similar ideas of engagement and self-service, but these experiences are rationalized based on empathy for an entirely different constituent-base, set of contexts, and desired business outcomes.

It is inevitable that these differences will impact an approach to the experience and UI design. A balance of alignment to existing visual conventions and the extension of known standards to new contexts are key to delivering a fully rationalized visual design approach.

Today’s consumers are empowered by technology. With that, experience design has become a bigger part of how they interact and connect with brands, as customers and employees. Visual design plays an important role in nurturing those connections and in the expression of a lasting visual brand experience.