How many articles do you find online today that invite you to perform a fun exercise? Allow me to invite you to participate in this quick experiment. It’s simple - picture yourself in the following situation:
You are a client of a crowdsourcing company. This crowdsourcing company has been hired to help with a UX problem. They want to redesign the purchase workflow of the e-commerce website. You are invited to join a meeting to review the first set of design submissions created by the amazing design community. They call this the checkpoint review meeting.
You had provided a set of requirements prior to this meeting, including branding preferences. Once you start going through the twenty submissions you received, you notice you don’t see anything familiar in the colors, fonts, and logo. After the meeting is done you have to report this to stakeholders.
You know for sure your stakeholders won’t like the submissions because all of them failed at accomplishing something fundamental, which was incorporating your company branding. Now your job position is at stake and you are feeling scared to show these submissions to the stakeholders. The meeting is over, you take a break.
*All of a sudden, a work colleague offers you three candies to soothe your pain. One of the candies is from a brand familiar to you, the two others you don’t know. This is the first time you’ve seen them. *
đź”®Question for you: what do you think you will end up choosing?
I choose them all.
According to research, we tend to have a strong preference for what is familiar to us when we feel in distress, in this case, sad or scared. We tend to prefer new things when we are happy. It means that it is very likely that you would choose the candy with familiar branding, the one that you already know. As a side note, there is a particular story within the Topcoder community that reflects a typical example of branding influence during distress: The Anatomy of a King’s Speech.
As part of this Branding 101 series tailored to Topcoder, my intention is to decompose the psychology behind the importance of providing accurate branding in design challenges. Welcome to part one. In part two, we study how to apply techniques and tricks to hit the right cables in a practical scenario.
There are already plenty of definitions about branding out there, but there is one that particularly calls my attention. It is very accurate because it considers emotions at its core.
“Brand represents the intellectual and emotional associations that people make with a company, product, or person…That is to say, brand is something that actually lies inside each of us. The science of branding is about designing for and influencing the minds of people—in other words, building the brand.” - Dirk Knemeyer, author of the infamous “Brand Experience and the Web”.
When we hear the word brand we typically think of a logo and some colors. We need to understand that we are emotional creatures, social animals driven by emotions. The secret to success of branding as a practice is the emotional connection it imprints on its subjects. Branding is not just about a logo; a brand creates an emotional association, a set of impressions that a person has about something (product, person, and so on).
Coming back to the story: you as a client of this crowdsourcing company are also an emotional creature, making decisions that are driven by feelings. Is there a way you can be persuaded to select a specific design over others? Frankly, there could be several ways to influence a client, but one that won’t leave room for escape would be an approach that attacks your emotional associations, the set of impressions that make you feel safe. Let’s learn why branding is so important in UI Design Challenges.
We like to win. We’re here competing to earn either experience or money, but there’s something to win for sure. If you want to widen your margins of victory you need to make use of all the little tricks and tools that can give you an advantage. There is another force to consider besides your desire to win: clients desire to feel safe. According to the emotional basis that we have defined so far, one of the best ways to influence the client in this specific situation is to make her feel comfortable. How do you achieve that from your position as a designer? Guess what, branding!
In most cases, you should go with what she already knows. If she doesn’t know it yet because you’re building it (open-ended challenge), then dig deep through some questions so you can find out what she likes and does not like for branding.
Have you heard the cliché line do not judge a book by its cover? Or the alternate version, don’t judge a person by the way she looks? You probably know this, but this is just not easy - not impossible, but not easy at all.
Let’s talk about the interesting subject of evolutionary psychology. This is the study of the evolution of emotions, which demonstrates how our brain works today while it is wired to an ancient part that still believes we live as we used to hundreds of thousands of years ago. Basically, the psychology of why we behave the way we do today is direct heritage from the way our ancestors used to behave a long time ago.
Now picture one of our honored ancestors, not too long ago, just one thousand years back. Times were a lot different. She was in the jungle in the Amazonian river of Brazil, happily wandering the lands of the unknown and wilderness. She suddenly hears a scratching noise and as she keeps walking, she notices there is a presence behind her, watching her. She turns around to see a big creature, something we know today as a black panther, twice as big as she is, staring into her eyes in stealth position while displaying very sharp fangs. She is in a compromised situation and has to make a quick decision. In a fraction of a second, she has to decide the intentions of this creature. Is it a friend or an enemy? Should I stay or should I go? Can it kill me or can I kill it? Will I survive this?
This type of decision was part of the life of most of our ancestors for so long that such behavior is stuck in our brain. Survival is one of the crudest, ruthless and impeccable instincts that we have.
Friend or enemy?
We can conclude that judging people, even nowadays, is a reflex of the impeccable survival instinct we carry around. It means that we will always tend to judge anything in our surroundings; we will judge a book by its cover look. The first impression does matter. The client will judge your work by the way it looks in less than one second. You want to make an effort to lead the client to judge your design as something safe, definitely not a black panther.
Review meetings are an esoteric topic within the community. Not many designers know how a client review meeting goes, what the clients look at, how they look at the submissions and how they provide feedback. Something important to know is that during checkpoint review meetings, the client takes the first look at the promise they received when they started the project: the design solutions.
Consequently, there are some expectations and grip of control clients want to have over the project outcome. It’s worth mentioning that, naturally, we are control freaks. From an early age we prefer to have control over elements in life because it gives the illusion of power. What would happen if a client gets to see designs where all the submissions are off-brand? Do you think that would give her some control and the illusion of power? Far away from that.
The most probable reaction would be to judge designers, the company and the process as useless, a waste of time and money. We don’t want that; we want to give the illusion of power by offering a solid branding reference to the client.
We have to face the fact that theory without practice is like having a body without a soul. In the follow up article in this series you will learn how to apply this design theory to actual Topcoder challenges. See How To Crack The Branding Of An Application Design Challenge.