Brand value and the user experience

Brent

Jotted down by Brent
on July 13th, 2009

Like most designers I end up becoming almost subconsciously critical of the things I love. At Lushai its usually my latest ‘user experience’ and most of the time it’s not even digital, it’s anything from door knobs & potato peelers to cell phones and this weekend a new car. All of these experiences adds to the perception of a brand.

Every action builds on the experience of the brand as if it were a person. Recently we have been frequenting a certain drive thru and every time the same branch forgets the same thing. Every time! So much so that I’m beginning to think they just don’t care about me or my family – their customers. Do I really want to mix with this person anymore? Nope, not me.

I’m sure the user experience of a brand is old in branding circles but in the online world it seems so many companies and their branding partners just don’t get it. Their ‘brand’ goes as far as guidelines for logo placement, colour and typography but very rarely do they follow through to the actual experience of their end-users. So the perception of the company is someone who cares a lot about how they look but could care less how they interact with customers. They just don’t get how their persona(lity) is experienced, and ultimately perceived, online.

Turkish anyone?
Try finding anything on a certain online yellow phone directory. The key words ‘Turkish’ and ‘Petone’ should surely bring up the most popular Turkish restaurant in my area. Hmmmm brezelmania anyone? Google does it with a snap but not the big yellow. Guess which one I never use?

That’s a big user experience fail, therefore brand fail. On a side note maybe Yellow need to do something about their SEO, they should be first on the list for New Zealand businesses in any Google search.

That’s only one of many examples where the experience and interaction just lets the brand down big time. How about online banking? My own bank makes everyday business a chore. As if the teller didn’t speak English and had to travel great distances to do anything. The whole experience is slow and unforgiving. If it wasn’t so hard to switch I would have moved out a long time ago that’s for sure.

This is just a tip of the iceberg post. I will be doing plenty of ux brand reviews over the next few months so let me know of your own experiences.

What online experience has hammered your brand perception recently?

2 Responses to “Brand value and the user experience”

  • Felicia wrote ›

    Hi Lulu, this article is certainly interesting. Coming from a background as a tester, I can be critical of things too. It’s in human nature to always try to make things better either for themselves or others.
    Well, this is not my own experience but few days ago, I saw on the news that 2degrees has a ‘hick-up’ with their website, i.e. registered customers are able to see other customers’ details. This is certainly really bad. Not only they have breached the privacy act, I’m sure that some people would lose faith in using the company’s website now. I’m surprised that this even happened. It made me think that they must not QA’d their work. Who knows?!
    Anyway, keep up the good work!
    Cheers, F.

    August 11, 2009 at 10:59 pm

  • brent wrote ›

    Hi Felicia, thanks for the comment. I definitely want to write some more on this topic in the future. A companies website is more and more becoming their public face these days and I think many of them are way behind on this. Oh it’s Brent by the way ;)

    August 14, 2009 at 2:34 pm

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