Your UI is your brand

A good digital experience is the reflection of the values of your brand.
As corporate communication touch points are embedded in everyone’s life, brands are more than just the visual components of a company.

Personality through interface

Decades of brand development have taught us that brand applications are successful when they present a unified graphic toolkit. Consistency must reign supreme and it takes years of hard work to create a coherent brand image and even more to maintain it.

But when thinking digitally, how do you make sure your brand stands out? Is your graphic toolkit robust when translated to the digital sphere and does it extend to interactions? Can you afford to apply your brand identity style guide to a generic web framework, thereby inheriting processes and micro interactions other brands might be using elsewhere online?

UI design is now used everywhere, banks and commodities are accessed more on a phone than a desktop and tech giants have developed visual systems for customers that not only provide a set graphic language but a set approach so that we, as users and designers, don’t need to think if we don’t want to.

If you are serious about standing out you must invest in creating a differentiator, it’s hard work but the results can yield an uncompromising position in a busy arena.

This is easier said than done, commercial applications are driven by analysis of user behaviour, a simple unique feature in the UI can affect revenue, and a tendency to standardise what customers expect in transactional experiences has therefore forced a vanilla approach.

User experience: expectations and surprise

There is ample room to create an environment to deliver the unexpected without compromising your bottom line. Users want to enjoy the experience, more context over consistency, your unique brand characteristics can be applied in new ways: micro-copy, animations, transitions, sound; You must go from good to great, quickly, and keep innovating as that’s the new expectation as a forward thinking company.

The approach will obviously be different whether it’s coming from an established entity or a new service but the effect can be the graduation into a 360 approach to branding where your UI experience feeds into and is recognisable as your brand.

Further reading:
Age Of Design — Airbnb design-led approach
IBM is becoming the most sophisticated design company — Qz.com
Monzo and the design economy — The Design Council
Dropbox rebrand — dropbox.design

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Words: Giulio Ruggieri

Giulio is Partner & Director of Interactive at Interstate.