Digital design. Where is the personal connection?
Since childhood, I have always had a personal connection to 3 companies:
- Nike
- Disney/Pixar
- and MTV (in its peak).
Why? Because they were (are) oriented to think about the intellectual and emotional experience they want to leave their customers with. Which in turn results in leaving people with a lasting memory, brand legacy or, as I always used to say….‘memorabilia’. This is across anything they do, their marketing, services, retail, pop-up events, physical and or digital touchpoints. While we see this from some fashion, social media and sports companies today, it seems to fail massively in other industries. For example, when was the last time you used a telco, insurance, government, grocery shopping, mortgage, real estate or investment company and was truly delighted by the experience? If we focus specifically on digital products, when was the last time you used one of these and was so excited that you had a conversation with a friend about how great you thought the product, brand, experience or features were for you?
I understand why this can happen. Usually it stems from various company reasons such as, siloed tools/departments/systems. An internal focus to measure KPI’s. Product Managers making product design decisions driven by statistical data and or, a priority to tick off a backlog, or meet a sprint deadline. Or even the company itself just lacking design maturity. But the end result is a huge sea of digital products for people to use, that all look and ‘feel’ the same. Grey forgettable bland experiences. Yes, they all meet usability best practices and follow ‘agile’ processes. But the end result is unengaging, forgettable, meaningless or not ‘human’. This is what I saw and still see as a huge difference between physical and digital product design.
In physical design, most consumer focused products have a requirement for that product be a physical manifestation and expression of the brand. Teams deeply consider the end users emotional engagement through the experience, and how that ties into the core brand values. Thus, forming a human-product connection.
This mindset shift alone helps companies gain personal connection & brand differentiation, leading to customers choosing you over competitors and repeatedly using your solution. Today, the digital design industry (and some teams) are so caught up on the digital hype, it has forgotten to include emotion, creativity or imagination within some of their key user journeys. In fact, most of the digital experiences are copy and paste outcome, with no real personality — just bland, productivity outcomes.
So how can this change? I think its largely through company culture and its approach. Incorporating a focus on measuring ‘user emotions and joy’ in user research and testing, instead of only analysing task completion stats. Consider whether key decisions being made are being driven by agile development buzz words, or by high-value user experience needs. Identifying what the brand or product value is or could be for people first, and then ways this can be expressed and experienced through individual touchpoints. This approach to design is at a higher level than basic functionality, or having the technical ability to use Sketch, Figma, Invision to iterate developments. It involves answering questions such as — How can what we are creating delight or give pleasure to people? What ways can we express the company value, purpose or personality through the products or services being offering? And then exploring and validating those high-value ideas and executing them.
At the end of the day, people buy products, services or systems that give them joy, ease and value. So if you don’t, eventually another company will.
It’s also known that most people will forgive or overlook annoyances, if overall they have an enjoyable experience. Look at how long people were willing to camp overnight on the cold hard streets, just to have the joy of experiencing the new Apple/Nike product. Or how many times have you yourself got annoyed about something, but then when it pleased you later, somehow it no longer bothered you any more?
To end this article, I thought I would give a list of some digital products that I think give or gave delight and personal connection:
Monzo: Onboarding experience. Creating an account using a selfie and picture of your passport instead of going into a bank.
Starbucks App: Personalization - App aims to know you. It records your favourite orders, suggest food pairings, nearby locations and places your order for you so it’s ready for pickup when you arrive.
Netflix: Preview a few seconds of a film before committing all the way.
Netflix: Cross device continuation of a film from TV to mobile/tablet.
Phlo: User friendly confirmations throughout their key journey.
Facebook: Celebrates with you regarding how long you have been friends with someone else as a milestone with pictures.
Uber: Taking payments directly from your bank account and finds a taxi for you nearby to reduce waiting times.
Nandos: Distinctive brand purpose and personality visually expressed within its app and interior design touchpoints.
Cleo: Conversational chatbot experience that genuinely is humanistic due to the tone of voice and deep relevant personal insights.
Thanks for reading. I’m a Design Leader, writer and speaker.
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