Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services by Goodwin Kim

Author:Goodwin, Kim...
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-08-12T17:37:25.696000+00:00

What positive brand values would you say are associated with the following well-known brands? What negative qualities are often ascribed to them?

IBM

Wal-Mart

Microsoft

Amazon

BMW

Most product requirements documents don't address brand because people either don't think about brand when designing their products (which is more common than you might imagine), or assume that existing brand descriptions will suffice. However, it's important to cover this topic specifically for each product because even the best corporate brands are difficult to translate directly into visual terms. What does "value for money" look like? What color is perfection? Also, different products within a brand may be targeting different markets, so there has to be some flexibility in how a brand is interpreted in visual language. Many corporate identity guidelines are also geared toward print or, at best, Web usage, and don't work well for software or physical products, where the corporate identity is often secondary to content or function.

Using persona goals allows for product-specific interpretation of the broader corporate brand. Persona goals don't define the brand, but they are the lens designers use to focus on the specific brand characteristics that are most appropriate to a particular type of user or customer. This interpretation results in a small set of requirements called experience attributes: visually oriented adjectives that describe the messages or personality the product should convey (see Figure 12.4).

Once the attributes are agreed upon, they serve as the basis for developing the visual and industrial design language (as well as the tone of content) in much the same way that personas and scenarios drive behavior. They're also helpful in getting stakeholders to assess different approaches to the design language based on something more objective than personal preference; when someone says, "I prefer bright purple and gold," you can reply, "We agreed that it was important to convey sophistication. When you think of other products you'd describe as sophisticated, none of them uses such a bright palette."

The visual designer and, if appropriate, the industrial designer should lead the development of the experience attributes; interaction designers use these requirements as well, but are usually less accustomed to translating emotional qualities into a design language. The process starts with a list of potentially desirable qualities from the corporate brand materials (including a brand's legacy) and stakeholder interviews, as well as qualities that seem desirable based on the persona goals and environments. These terms are then distilled and refined using something akin to the affinity diagram technique described in Chapter 10. The end result is a set of four (occasionally three or five) experience attributes, each of which has a handful of supporting terms. Like the other requirements, the experience attributes are intended to be discussion and decision-making tools.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.