Branding & Identity with Experiments and Data-driven Decisions
I recently had the pleasure of doing a corporate rebrand with the design team at Genospace. Our brand was transformed to reflect the company’s values of integrity, collaboration, creativity, trust, perseverance and data-driven decision making. To communicate the organization’s values, we developed a visual language to reflect them. The intersecting lines of color represent multivariate data, disparate, and disconnected data becoming accessible through the Genospace platform. The products we build are the catalyst for discovery and insight in precision medicine. It drives us to advance the field toward better patient outcomes.
The role of design in branding is to clearly communicate an organization’s values and culture through a visual language. — [ tweet this]
The finished branding emerged from a process which included:
- Revisiting and refining the company mission, vision, and values
- Creative and conceptual designs that aligned with company values
- Hypothesis generation and rigorous iterative testing on design concepts through A/B testing and customer interviews
- Content audit of existing brand
- Requirements for new/old digital and physical brand materials
- Content creation
- Planning and execution
By following a calculated and well-defined process, we were able to justify the next experiments we wanted to run at each step of the project. Below is an example output of one of the dozens of tests we ran. Here we can see that the original Genospace logo, B, was in fact perceived as the most digitally advanced, driven by discovery, and visually appealing to our potential customer segment. However, severely lacked trustworthiness. Concept C performed well consistently in this test, which drove us to follow up with the colors and visual style in later analyses.
Trust is the filter through which all success must pass. — [ tweet this]
One of the tests we ran in response to the findings in the test above was to develop a visual paradigm that closely followed customer preferences in each of the other test questions, but improve the trustworthiness of the original. The results below show that the redesign in this later experiment is superior in each of the experiment questions.
The examples shared here were only a sample of the battery of tests we ran during the rebranding process, but I hope that these gave some insight into the process as a whole. Below you can find visual examples of the new Genospace brand in action.
Credit to Anneka Björkeson, a talented Visual Designer at Genospace, without whom this project wouldn’t have been possible. You can also find more about the rebrand project on our Behance page.
About the Author
Nicholas Tenhue is currently UX and Product Strategy lead at Genospace. Previously VP Creative at Capy Inc., Co-founder of RunTroll, and Design & DataViz at Intel. Alumnus of Microsoft Ventures, Founder & President of EIT Digital Alumni. Learn More about Nicholas.
