Balance brand storytelling and UX for a superior digital experience.
Top brands put a lot of effort into crafting their story, vision, and values across multiple marketing channels. When it comes to the digital channel, brands should try to balance the usability of their experience with brand storytelling. Unfortunately, most focus on either a solid transactional experience or a strong brand storytelling journey, and not both together.
Users bring expectations of the brand with them online. They expect the brand’s digital experiences to convey the values, tone, and ethos. So, when users encounter a site that’s easy to use and effectively conveys the brand's mission or values through engaging interactions and compelling content, they are more likely to return. According to Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention correlates with at least a 25% increase in profit. So there are clear business reasons for getting this balance right.
Consider Nike.com as an example of a site in balance. The user experience is intuitive and easy to learn with a clean and easy shopping experience and purchase journey. The content, images, videos and interactions align well with the brand messaging. ‘Just do it’ comes through in the category pages and product imagery, where the models demonstrate sports and workouts immediately upon the users’ arrival to the site.
The Zara website provides a contrasting experience. The design focuses on strong visuals, and brand storytelling is a clear priority for the Zara design team. Unfortunately, the efforts to elevate the brand message cause problems with the site's usability. Often the navigation elements are not in strong enough contrast to the background image, and the usability feels like an afterthought. The result is a disjointed and frustrating digital experience that does not live up to user expectations of the brand values: beauty, clarity, functionality, and sustainability.
At the other end of the spectrum, Abercrombie is a site that places too much emphasis on the transactional experience and not enough on brand storytelling. The site is usable with easy-to-understand navigation and precise details on the product description pages. Still, the brand is neglected, and the experiential aspects customers expect from Abercrombie’s advertising and in-store experience are lacking.
When people familiar with a brand visit a store, for example, they bring expectations from previous experiences. Often, those expectations are met by the quality of the goods, how the staff treat them, the design of the in-store layout, the music, the smell, the tone of voice and overall ethos. The experience is designed carefully to convey what the brand stands for.
Yet when that same customer visits the digital experience, the brand can get diluted. When those brand elements are not present, the experience can feel lacking. Without a compelling and memorable experience, users may turn to one of the easy-to-use marketplaces waiting for their business (i.e., Amazon) instead.
We know from research we’ve conducted and studies we’ve seen elsewhere that there are some critical knock-on effects of not getting this balance right. Consider the following stats:
45% of users have switched brands because of a poor online experience (1)
52% of users have said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a brand (2).
To help our clients deliver more balanced experiences, we’ve developed a UX score which combines five components critical to ensuring the user experience elevates the brand. It’s a quantitative measure based on members of the target audience participating in an unmoderated study. People interact with a website and score how well the company delivers a good user experience and how well it meets their expectations for the brand.
Our UX Score examines digital experiences based on the following criteria:
Operability — ‘Easy to use’ is a critical component of user experience. It’s the building block of a good site, app, or digital product and must score well.
Here we might look at how easy it is to move through the experience to complete tasks and whether the information provided at each step in the journey helps users complete tasks successfully.
Learnability — Closely related to this is how easy it is to use with no training. If the site, app or digital product is easy to understand for people new to it, it has a much higher chance of being used more often.
Within this category, we check to see if users know where they are and the next steps in the process. We also examine whether the interface speaks the users’ language instead of internal business jargon.
Product Fit — Product Fit is about how well the experience delivers what users need and expect. Study participants will give feedback on how well the product provides a useful and valuable exchange for the time they invested in it.
We look at how well the experience fits the user’s context and whether it demonstrates credibility or expertise in delivering support to users reaching their goals.
Look & Feel — We know from our research that design has a significant role in how an experience is perceived and how likely users want to engage in the first place.
Here we look at how well the visual design aligns with the company branding guidelines and whether the design implementation is free from confusion or clutter.
Inspiration — We’ve seen experiences that deliver on all of the previous components but still lack something that drives users to want to return or stick around longer. So, we also measure how well the experience does to inspire users.
We measure how well the brand message is applied throughout the experience. And whether the site allows users to engage in meaningful and personalised interaction.
These five components support clients in designing quality user experiences that also deliver the brand users expect. We’ve conducted extensive research to track our UX score against other measures such as C-SAT and NPS. We’re pleased to see a correlation between good scores in both.
Consider the websites you use regularly. How well do they balance the brand with the user experience? How about the company you work for? If you look at ways to achieve balance, you might find your experience metrics tell a more positive story.
1 — Ipsos: Rep sample of n=1050 adults across the UK (May 2021)
2 — Think with Google Research from 2012
