How to turn boring into interesting. The magic behind a brand's soul

Ivan Barriga at UXDX Community: How to Balance Focus, Inclusivity, and Brand Magic. Video: https://youtu.be/NuQI3JeEFVk

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction: a full-stack designer who evangelizes brand

[00:00:00] Hi everybody. First, I just want to start by saying I'm super excited and honored to be here. Thank you so much for having me, and for taking the time to attend these chats, everyone. My name is Ivan Barriga. I actually have a shiny new kind of job right now. I'm the creative director for FlavorCloud, a leading global logistics platform that makes international shipping easy, affordable and friction-free, allowing brands to expand their international footprint.

[00:00:30] A little bit of background information. I have been a full-stack designer for a little over 12 years. Huge on evangelizing the importance and the impact of the brand, and how we could really use it on any kind of project to increase user engagement, to really try to communicate that philosophy and that soul that we're trying to convey when we're trying to push a product, or really anything. I have always been an advocate for this, and I had the honor of working with many, many brands. Among those: Monster Energy, Paramount Pictures, Technicolor, and a wide diversity of projects. Anything from product design, research, UI, UX, traditional web design and print design. That's usually been in my realm, and any of those can use the help of good branding.

[00:01:30] So I figured, for this chat, in the spirit of branding, I figured I'd design something that represents me better. So let's call it kind of like Ivan-branded, and that way it creates a little bit more of that memorable effect, hopefully, by the end of the chat. And with that said, I love using a bold approach with color and typography on a lot of my designs, and that's usually what I'm more drawn towards. And I also love video games, so as you can tell, we're going to be going through some of that Ivan-branded material as we speak about the magic behind a brand and how to use it to your advantage. So let's get started.

Design like a boss, and lose the fear of experimenting

[00:02:19] Now, one of the first things that I usually try to really communicate to any teams, any designers, whether they're part of my team or anything else, any other engagement, is to really be confident. Try to design like a boss. Really understand the idea that design is always evolving, a brand is always evolving, and we really need to understand where that soul lies. Is it memorable? Is that voice consistent with what the customers are perceiving from that brand? Is that coming true, or is it somewhere in the middle where you have to keep evolving and iterating to be able to flesh out that concept and that philosophy?

[00:03:03] I am a huge advocate of research as well. I think that that's where we can find that middle between business strategy, beauty, functionality and everything that would make that brand timeless at the end of the day, which is what we're all striving for. So that middle of strategy, beauty and functionality is key in branding.

[00:03:33] The second thing is something that I always notice a lot on the smaller teams, and a lot of the time within design teams, whether they're product, web, just marketing. It's just that fear of trying something else, of experimenting. And I always really try to encourage everyone to just kind of lose that and try to be bold and dare to stand out. Then you can really start experimenting and see if your branding is really conveying or communicating that message. Being able to really do the unexpected and create a sense of surprise and discovery with your audience is something that all brands aim to constantly achieve, and that's what creates that memorable effect, that recognizable branding on any of your products.

[00:04:24] And this is usually achieved by finding those signature moments. I know that's a term used a lot in design systems, which kind of falls more on the product design realm, but it's very important to infuse that in these processes as well. Finding something, whether it's movement, micro-interactions, colors, the way you approach typography, very very subtle things that your audience are going to start recognizing and linking to your brand and your product. And that's usually what creates a memorable experience.

Examples: Monster Energy's internal products

[00:04:57] This is something that you can apply to anything, and this is where I usually like to show some examples, because it's very important to understand how you can apply these to even products that weren't meant to be fun or exciting. The first one I always like to show is this: an internal product created for Monster Energy. It was meant to track a lot of their accounting processes. They were struggling a lot with readability. Some of their user flows were very, very convoluted, three, four clicks before the user actually reached their destination.

[00:05:34] So the way we approached that problem, going through research, going through prototype and testing, was to try to leverage the power of their very bold and beautiful, bright branding and create something that's a little bit more readable, easier to digest. And this is a very, very complex product, so this would require almost a different talk.

[00:06:00] But as you can see, branding was used and tested here with a different set of audiences within the company, to really try to leverage the power of color. Their logos and everything is within what you would see on their outside products, on their external products. So everything is designed to be scalable. It keeps that adaptive mindset for the branding. And while some of the patterns here might not be present on their design system, for example, it's something that you could always find and recognize the brand, you can link it, and you can understand, okay, this is something that Monster Energy created.

[00:06:40] This is a second product created for them, same, very similar approach. After the first one was very, very successful, we were tasked with creating another product for different teams, but it's still a similar target audience, accounting, and those kinds of very, very heavy... oops. Very, very heavy on understanding the data and how to read it, how to understand, if it's green it belongs to this specific sub-product. So the idea of sub-branding, super important also, and that's what we leveraged on this specific project.

Creative freedom within consistent guidelines

[00:07:29] Now, as we continue here, the other thing that I always really advocate for is embracing that creative freedom[?]. And this is very, very close to that losing the fear. But it's very important to stay consistent in terms of the tone, the voice and the look and feel of the branding. So it's okay to experiment, it's very important to stay curious, but at the same time we have to maintain some guidelines that, even though they're fluid, they may be flexible, we need to maintain that philosophy, that core message. Are we bold, are we fun, are we more modern, or are we just kind of more clean cut? So those are the important things to keep in mind when using the brand as a tool.

Visual design as a tool: type, space, color, texture, balance and scale

[00:08:25] Now, as you would imagine, visual design is one of the most effective disciplines that you could use for the branding side. That doesn't mean that it should be used in a vacuum, or should really generate assets or deliverables within just that vacuum. It needs to really connect and collaborate with research. All these things are very important so you can understand what your users want.

[00:08:51] Now, these are some of the core elements that I think are very important, especially when using visual design as a tool, and really as a discipline, to emphasize how impactful your brand could be for your audience. The first one, of course, is just the magic of type and space. I'm sure we can all agree typography is one of those things that often gets ignored, and it's super, super important as a brand to find which one really kind of conveys the voice of your brand, that message, really communicates what you're about.

[00:09:29] And in terms of space and using shapes, negative space is always your friend. I see this very often, time and time again: when negative space is not really used, then you start decreasing the importance of your visual hierarchy, and that's when things start impacting the UX. You have a very overwhelming user experience, you start generating pain points, and everything could have been handled from the beginning if proper visual design would have been applied to those stages. And the branding as well: keep leveraging all those elements from branding in order to convey your ideas and to guide the audience's eye, their focus, whether you're creating a site, a product, or even print media. This is all very usable on every single one of those disciplines.

[00:10:24] Second one: color and texture. The color scheme is something that you really have to almost analyze, and this doesn't apply just with your customers but also internally, being able to generate some of that data from the beginning, qual data, sitting down with your founders, with your team, understanding, okay, how do you guys see the brand, what's the message here, how can we use that, and the psychology behind the color palette that we end up choosing to communicate that message, and how we can evolve it. Being able to place that color scheme in the right arena is what's going to communicate that message to your audience.

[00:11:05] So a lot of the times things get a little bit rigid, and then you start using only one or two colors that are not even conveying the brand's message, and that's when you start kind of fracturing that philosophy, which eventually will impact the way you're perceived and it will decrease your brand's recognition.

[00:11:28] Texture is another one of those tools that has been very, very dominant during the last, especially during the last five to 10 years, and it connects with the audience. It really kind of creates that sense of different feelings, and these are very interesting things that you could flesh out a little bit more through testing and through research, when you sit down with customers and you start understanding how it makes them feel. But that's again a separate talk on its own.

[00:12:00] And then balance and scale. This is something that will really allow your user to follow and digest content easily. Again, whether this applies to a simple email, a social media asset, a site, anything, a product, it's very important to be able to create that balance, so you don't provide an overwhelming experience for your users and start impacting the UX. You want to keep it easy to digest, and this is where again you can leverage that branding and just the way you position things to preserve that visual hierarchy. And scale, that's something that applies of course to all elements really in branding, and it's a really good tool when you're trying to convey that philosophy that we're talking about for branding.

Examples: Technicolor's project tool and Paramount's intranet

[00:12:54] Now, I have two examples that I always like to share when we're talking about these specific projects. The first one was a project created for Technicolor. It's just a project management tool, and here we could see how, even from the beginning, the branding was applied to be able to increase that readability, to be able to create a clear visual hierarchy where the user understands, okay, where am I going to look first? This is a lot of data, but I'm able to digest it, I'm able to create a relationship or link different concepts, whether it's something recent or something a little bit delayed. That's what was achieved here. And you could see even the use of their colors, their imagery. I mean, this is a very, very bold company as well, so I thought it was important to represent that throughout the product.

[00:14:01] So the idea of that sub-branding is super important within the branding design arena, where you can create almost smaller parts within that big pot.

[00:14:18] And the second one is pretty much an intranet created for Paramount Pictures. Now, this one is a very interesting project, because as you would expect, and we all have experienced this, intranets are not meant to be exciting a lot of the time. So that usually creates very, very low engagement, and it almost kind of becomes an experience that the audience just drags to. So we really wanted to approach it in a way that we use branding as a tool to increase that user engagement and kind of give that sense of ownership to every single team.

[00:14:56] So that's why we tested a lot of these different user flows and created those kinds of funnels, where okay, the features team has that different sub-branding within the big Paramount umbrella branding, same with television and animation. And as you go on every single one you will see even how scalable that is. Even within that department, the features department, their clearances department, have their own kind of identity, BFS[?], music, and you see that throughout the entire thing. So this, which was originally thought of as a boring product, or something that's just functional, we actually created something that is beautiful, that is heavily branded, and that increased user engagement, increased really the usability of the product, decreased a lot of the clicks on the UI patterns, and just created a very delightful and memorable experience.

[00:15:49] So you could see everything is being sub-branded within every small pod, and even things like just the way that we show some of their FAQ sections, or even the way we show areas that are often kind of ignored. So those are some of the examples that really apply to just heavy visual design combined with good strategy, good UX research, good testing, and just that iterative process.

Stages of brand growth: research

[00:16:29] Now, after this, I always like to talk about that brand growth, and how we can think of this in terms of adding stages to the process, something that's easy to reuse, that is easy to communicate to other teams, so we keep that branding tool always impactful within our different stages for design, whether that's for product, marketing, sales. Everything applies to that process.

[00:17:02] So the first one, super important, I'm a very, very big advocate of research. I don't believe in applying branding for the sake of kind of a unilateral view, like if one of the founders loves red and just pumping a lot of red through your marketing materials or your product. There's got to be a reason for that. You have to be able to understand your audience, you have to be able to pinpoint that message, and research really, really allows you to do that. So sitting down with your team, aligning that core philosophy for the brand, is incredibly useful, especially when looking for what makes your brand unique and how you want to communicate this message.

[00:17:41] So very important to note that research just doesn't really apply, as I'm mentioning here, to the audience, the customers. It's also very important to constantly have those cycles of internal research within your team. Conducting, of course, if you're just starting, creating a brand from the ground up, very important to conduct things like competitive analysis, just to understand what potential competitors are doing and really understand how you can set yourself apart, how your message could really be communicated, and how your brand soul is unique and how it could really be useful for your audience.

Stages of brand growth: testing and balance

[00:18:26] The second one: testing. So this, as you guys already can see, I'm sure, kind of follows a lot of that product design mentality, and I think that's super important, because again, research and testing go a lot hand in hand. Constantly iterating, staying on that adaptive mindset, and really being able to iterate. You prototype, you test it, you have different kinds of workshops, and you can really understand how you're viewed from the outside as a brand and how the team views the brand itself, and see if you keep striving to reach that middle.

[00:19:03] So different things could be done on this one. Different kinds of workshops, brand perception, impression testing, and that will generate customer insights, of course. Impression testing is something that's very, very easy to do, especially when you're starting. You've done your research, you have some patterns in there, you apply it to a prototype and you start fleshing out what you think your brand is. You could run something as simple as an impression test where you show this thing to a small audience, you show them this product for a few seconds, and start asking, what adjectives would you use to describe what you saw, this brand? And really start fleshing out how they feel, what's the message that they're getting from what they saw. And tying that together with your brand itself, your brand message, is what's going to, at the end of the day, really align you to become something more concise and easy to understand.

[00:20:06] An example of that kind of research is something as simple as this. You hand out a document, you have a set of adjectives. And now this one, it's important to mention, this one is not for a brand that was just starting. It's something in the middle, where we're kind of trying to iterate to be able to find that middle. And then you can mix it a lot of the times with a little bit of qualitative research where you ask some questions, then you start trying to find those patterns where the user expresses either discomfort or unhappiness, whatever it may be. So very, very important to keep these stages always available and constant, based on how you need to adapt your brand.

[00:21:01] And the last one is balance, really. I'm a very big advocate of just that balance between beauty and usability. I don't think that one should be sacrificed over the other, and this, in my opinion, should be applied to anything and everything, whether it's a product, an application, anything, marketing. It's very important, because that's where your brand will shine, and that's where you reach that timelessness that we're all looking for.

[00:21:33] So very important to keep that adaptive mindset. And that's something that, as you evangelize more the importance of branding and staying flexible, you may need to educate some of the stakeholders with these and really show the importance. Now, for that, always leverage the use of data, user data, super important, and then you can really get more buy-in from stakeholders that way.

Brand ownership is a team effort

[00:22:04] And at the end of the day, successful design as a whole, and especially in the branding design arena, is really a team effort. I don't believe that any successful brand today, or in the future, really was created in a vacuum with just a few designers figuring out what looks good. It was definitely created with the collaboration of all the teams: partnerships, sales, marketing. Every single team has something to promote, and the more you promote this mentality within your team, the more that branding ownership will increase. And once you create that sense of brand ownership, where every teammate feels proud of wearing your brand's colors, that's when you see great things happen, because you start seeing more experimentation, less fear, and then you start evangelizing the brand as an impactful thing to use throughout the entire organization.

[00:23:01] And yeah, at the end of the day, our customers really determine our direction, and really understanding how they are impacted with the way we present ourselves as a brand, as a product, is what's going to create something that becomes timeless. I keep using that word because that's what I define as successful for a brand: when something becomes timeless, you recognize it even if you see a very, very small ad on LinkedIn or Facebook. That's what we should all strive to achieve.

[00:23:38] Some other examples I had were, for example, this one, DigitalOcean, a different company, and this is just a sample used as experimentation with one of my teams in the past. And of course we try to pump some of that fun element, very, very big on negative space, and even very small micro-interactions like this that connect directly with that brand, that ocean idea, and just articulating that message even through very small interactions like that, or very small animations even like that one.

[00:24:18] Same with Onlet[?], which was my previous company. When we talk about branding ownership, we talk about even doing things like this. This was our internal Christmas card, and creating this kind of evangelizing, and really trying to get stakeholder buy-in for this kind of project, is super important. And this is something that was interactive, shared with everyone, and it really starts creating that sense of brand ownership that will generate ideas and will trickle down to the entire process. It's super important, I cannot stress enough how important that is.

[00:24:55] And we have other experimentations, again something a little more interactive, where you could draw something and simply save that as a PNG and have that kind of internal contest. And with them it was very interesting, because we definitely wanted to pump that sense of movement, and that's something that we try to infuse even through small micro-interactions like this one. And as you can see, it's something that's very representative of the brand itself at this point.

[00:25:39] And I think that should be it. Thank you everyone so, so much for just taking the time. Hopefully this will leave you inspired to look at brand design, or at a brand and its philosophy, as a tool to really empower more of that message, whether it's through your team in product or marketing, sales, anywhere. It's something that you can absolutely use to your advantage. Thank you everyone.

Q&A

[00:26:08] Rory: Excellent, thank you very much, Ivan. I think you're going to win the prize for the prettiest, best animated slides I think I've ever seen, so thank you for sharing those. But yeah, just a reminder to everybody, if you have any questions for Ivan please do post them on whichever platform you're watching this on, and we'll pass those questions through to Ivan. But I'm going to jump in first, and my question, and I'm going to play a bit of a devil's advocate here: how do you convince people? Because a lot of those things, they're delightful and they're great user experiences, but they're not critical for the functionality. So how do you go about convincing somebody? Because I know personally I've been in the situation where you're trying to argue for, oh no, this will improve it, but it's kind of, tick the box on functionality, let's move on to the next thing. So do you have any tips that people can use to kind of try to advocate for it and try to pitch why, yes, we should invest the extra time and effort in the delight?

[00:27:18] Ivan: Absolutely. Always really leverage the power of user data. I mean, that's what I've used in so many projects where I am in that situation, and it's hard to get a stakeholder buy-in when you know this might add two extra weeks to the entire project. So if you are able to conduct something as simple as that impression testing that I mentioned in there, and really show those patterns to the stakeholders, where, well, you can see that 70% of the audience sees us as boring, sees us as gloomy, then you're going to start getting some of that buy-in from some of those stakeholders, where they're going to be very likely to approve a small test where you could test, well, let me just show you, if we redesign this small module or this group of components here, we can run a very simple A/B test and see what engages more. And I can almost guarantee that this one will always give you that edge. And if you look at this on any of the successful products nowadays, they all carry that. They all didn't ignore the power of branding and that visual power, that punch that it could have for your audience.

[00:28:35] Rory: Excellent. Yeah, it's always a tough one, so hopefully, if people are right there, maybe try that A/B test approach. I'm just looking at the time, we are actually out of time, so I just want to thank you once again for sharing that amazing talk, and I hope everybody out there enjoyed it as much as I did. Thank you.