What a brand promises. Good UX delivers.

The era of “You can’t sit with us” is over; in times of recession, we must be more integrated into our companies than ever. So, let’s discuss why it’s important for UX people to learn branding, what you can do to support your company’s brand, and how your branding colleagues might support you. But first of all:

What is branding?

Just to set the flight height: Think of the most famous music streaming service, where you can easily find almost any music you want and your favorite podcasts…

It’s interesting to observe that we probably thought about the same brand, and it happened even without showing any visual assets. This indicates that a brand exists before logos, ads, or any visuals. In fact, a brand is a promise; It’s a person or company telling you that if you connect with them, they will offer you benefits, feelings, and experiences. So, in simple terms, branding is managing the promises made, the expectations set, and defining how people will remember a person or a company.

But why is branding important for UX designers?

If you still have doubts about how relevant branding might be for your work as a UX designer, I brought you some reasons:

Consistency goes beyond interfaces.

As a designer for a tech company, the result of your work is the most significant brand asset. It’s where users genuinely experience the brand’s essence. Consider that music streaming company we were thinking of— regardless of how much they spend on advertising if users can’t find their favorite songs, they won’t remember that product as a good one.

It’s crucial because your product will deliver what a brand promises.

To ensure that your products meet the user expectations, you need to have a clear understanding of your company’s brand. This understanding is the baseline for a good conversation and enables you to question, deliver, and make necessary adjustments to products and the brand. Consistent experiences can only be created if you understand the brand and the company’s promises. It’s important to remember that the user experience starts before they even interact with your next cool feature.

Collaborating

Since we are on the same page now, let’s discuss how to collaborate successfully.

The hard truth is that no team has complete control over the user experience. However, even though most parts are beyond our control, there are touchpoints where we can influence. That’s why collaboration is essential.

To help you elaborate on how to make it happen, I split this topic into how you might support branding, get support, and build together. This should cover a good initial collaboration.

How can UX support branding?

Education about UX methods

The first logical step is to educate them about how and why you do UX design and research. These alignments are important to keep high-level/high-quality discussions about UX topics. It’s amazing how much education can transform any colleague into a UX ally. You can do this by giving workshops within the company, creating spread-the-word sessions to present how UX works, or just sending interesting and easy-to-understand materials to a colleague with whom you’ve already sparked this conversation. Focus on making it comfortable for them to learn.

Up-to-date user insights

While sales people have the privilege to sit with those who choose your products daily, you have the chance to learn how the actual product users feel and use it. More than what people say, your UX research and analytics methods can provide your branding colleagues with more detailed and fresh user insights of what people do, so it might be good to check if personas still behave as expected and described. If not, it might be important to suggest changes to the initial personas to your branding team.

Just a quick note: UX teams are more effective when suggest changes and influence people instead of imposing changes on them.

How might branding support UX?

Flipping the coin, let’s see how branding professionals might assist you.

To begin this section, I want you to consider: How many companies start with a UX foundation and Design Systems in place versus how many begin with a brand book?

[I will give you 3 seconds to think]

When starting a company, having a structured UX foundation and Design Systems is rare. The painful truth is that this is not considered a priority for early-stage companies. However, it’s common for companies to hire branding agencies to create the initial steps of a brand. Often, the initial brand research, structure, and documents might be a great starting point for your UX structures. So let’s explore what you can get from it:

Personas

It’s normal to start a business with a buyer persona in mind. It’s important to understand these personas and how these studies were conducted by the team. So, you can use them as a starting point to create your research target audience, knowing who to reach out for your next research or user test.

Fundamentals of the brand

The brand book normally contains elementary points, and I want to split them into two categories: principles and visuals.

Principles: For the principles part, using the brand book, you might learn what your brand stands for, what the most important values are, it's positioning, tone of voice, and what it's target or mission is. This will support your decisions when establishing your UX principles, and will create a baseline for future discussions about the brand.

Visuals: Thinking about visuals, according to a report by Sparkbox in 2021, two of the most important design system elements (and consequently your interface designs) are color and font. By checking the brand book, you can get a base for these two basic elements.

Getting closer to business

Branding departments are often within or close to marketing, which puts them in the business loop. Since they usually get insights from market research and what customers are directly telling sales and marketing people, they have another perspective of your customers. Even if they are not the ones down the line with customers, listening to them can make your team closer to the core business and to the choosers of your product.

What might you build together?

There are some areas that you might be working together, e.g.

• Designing a website that corresponds to the user experience of your actual product;
• Sharing design libraries to keep assets organized and consistent;
• Creating product release strategies to increase brand endorsement by showcasing new features.
• Creating a shared research repository for easy access to UX and market research.

And within your teams, you can always explore and create more shared responsibilities.

What can we learn from branding people?

Building a name and a reputation takes time, effort, and cadence. It applies to your UX team, so think about rituals, presentations, releases, documents, and touch points to evangelize your company. (Be the CrossFit person💪, but with UX).

What do we get by starting this movement?

UX people often say that their companies need more UX maturity, but it’s not rare to see teams closing themselves in a room of cool and misunderstood kids. If you want people to get more UX education, you must help them get educated.

This is not a one-off.

And don’t get it wrong, collaboration with branding people isn’t a project; it’s part of a process. Which means that it’s not a one-off conversation. To keep things going, you must make these conversations recurrent, invite them to your releases or the most relevant rituals, and keep an open mind to listen, learn, explain, and iterate.

Next Steps

And what do could you do from now? I recommend to start new conversations. To invite people to your desk to spark ideas. When you invite people to the discussion, they feel shared ownership of the outcome, and designing the right things becomes easier. So be close, design in collaboration, and use your product design team insights to influence and update your brand and branding processes. Again, the era of "You can’t sit with us" is over.

Find me and tell me how it went

The ones who will start this conversation are the ones who are going to be successful in spreading the UX culture. If you’re one of these people, find me on LinkedIn or schedule a time for free on my ADPList.org and tell me how it went. I’m curious to see how it went and to support you succeeding.