Why brands need corporate identity and 7 more naive questions about design for business

On the one hand, style is just a shell. Good design does not make a bad product successful. But when the product already perfectly covers the needs of the user, the brand can think about beauty and conceptuality. This is especially important in highly competitive niches where buyers choose from multiple offerings. This is where positioning and visualization come in. A brand with a rebuilt corporate identity is more likely to fall in love with users than a simply good product without it.

There are first-order metaphors: a cow on a milk carton or a chat icon on a messenger logo. But really good images require deeper analysis. Visual style is a consequence of brand strategy and positioning. The idea passes into the hands of the design team, which, with the help of pictorial solutions, answers the question of why one grandmother is better at targeting than another. Or he chooses where the car will drive in the advertisement - in the middle of the mountains or the night streets of the metropolis. All these details are important, they convey the values ​​of the company. After creating a style concept based on the brand idea, work begins on the use of style in the product, marketing channels and communication with customers.

This is wrong. Brand DNA can be represented as a triangle diagram. It describes what the brand is built on, what ideas it brings to people and what its value is. At the same time, the value should grow from the importance of the product - its appearance and function. Accordingly, this picture is the same as the flag or coat of arms of the state. They also symbolically express important ideas for society. The brand is a distant heir to coats of arms. It consists not only of the logo, but also extends to other objects that the user comes into contact with: merchandise, icons in the application, business cards, patterns, offline spaces. In principle, all this cannot be expressed in one beautiful picture. Some brands choose a visually "poor" style. Through such a solution, certain values ​​can also be expressed, for example, accessibility or ease of use.

The point of a redesign is not to radically redo everything. Recently, the brand’s transition from the Latin alphabet to the Cyrillic alphabet and the adaptation of the corporate identity to the digital environment have become frequent reasons for changes. A logo that looks good on print media can look terrible on interfaces. From the outside, the changes seem small, but there is a lot of strategic and creative work behind them.

For example, the redesign of Yandex Lavka. Previously, their logo included a half-open lid of yogurt, but now it has a heart on it. I think the company decided to add emotions to the image, to create a cozy mood, consonant with the word “shop”. In addition, the redesign reflected versatility: now you can buy not only food in the service. In addition, the team extended the idea of ​​a new logo to the level of micro-illustrations in the interface: icons for sections are drawn on the main page in the same spirit of naive art.

Product design involves following the HADI cycle hypothesis testing method. It consists of four stages. First you need to come up with and select hypotheses to test. They can be taken from a huge number of data sources: feedback from customers, the accumulated experience of team members, product analytics, UX research. Next, the hypotheses need to be tested. This is done in different ways: A/B experiments, research on behavioral factors in the UX lab, surveys.

At the stage of data collection, the necessary amount of information is accumulated, which can be analyzed. An A/B experiment requires a lot of data, otherwise the analysis will be unreliable. And for qualitative research, a small sample is enough, because it is more important to get insights about user behavior.

When the data is collected, it is necessary to draw the right conclusions and understand how the solution being tested meets the goal: proves or refutes the hypothesis.

It seems to me that if a designer thinks with the formula “what will happen if you do this…”, then he is, to one degree or another, a product designer. From this way of thinking, the sequence of actions is automatically corrected.

An experienced designer will be helped by observation - the use of successful solutions from existing interfaces. For example, you can check competitors' apps and design patterns from similar areas. If some solutions work well there, then with a high probability this will happen in your application.

In general, there are many ways, because convenience is measurable. There is even a standard describing it. It includes degrees of efficiency, productivity (it is also called resource intensity) and user satisfaction in a specific context when solving a specific task.

There are also UX labs to assess usability, which help to scientifically measure its level through in-depth interviews and observation of user behavior. But you can also conduct so-called corridors: rapid tests with one or two simple tasks that we ask our colleagues to complete in a prototype of a future application.

The task of a product designer is to help the company achieve its goals. If this is an increase in sales, then the designer has a direct impact on this. This requires different skills. For example, in order to find growth points, it is important to be able to work with data, analyze past studies, and think in hypotheses. Creative thinking methods allow you to generate more ideas, and critical thinking allows you to weed out potentially ineffective solutions and focus on the main thing. Hypothesis testing skills help to verify the correctness of decisions and evaluate the effect.

The designer can tell you where to place entry points and how to highlight target actions, for example, put the “Buy” button in the marketplace application correctly. Or how to make the main elements that influence the purchase decision visible and understandable.

In identity, especially digital products, there are no trifles. There are only parameters due to which the product can stand out or merge with the crowd of similar ones. For example, this is a sign, color, font, illustration style, brand character, slogan, patterns. Each of these parameters can be controlled - made more unusual or, conversely, simple and expected. If it is important for a brand to stand out clearly, for example, in the youth niche, then, most likely, the entire identity will be bright: biting name, acid colors, non-standard style of illustrations, display font, etc. Further. All these parameters together make up the image of the brand.