5 ways to consider UX in your branding.

Branding and UX can often be considered as two separate disciplines, however, from working across both industries over my 10 years at ClickyGroup, it’s become clear that successful brands consider UX as a key component of their branding strategy. 

A common misconception is that branding is a logo or wider visual elements, but branding is so much more. It’s every touch point that customers have with your business and their perception of your company, products and services. Jeff Bezos, Amazon can be famously quoted  “Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.” and therefore, it’s important that how we behave as a brand, provides a positive experience for our customers.

To do this, we must understand who our customers are and their wants, needs, desires, and pain points,  which is where UX comes in.

We can start connecting branding with UX, applying brand attributes to experiences.

Here are 5 ways you can start to consider UX in your branding strategy. 

1.Make Accessible Font choices.
When building your brand guidelines it’s important to consider the fonts that will represent your brand. Whilst they should be considered as part of the visual identity, it is also important that they are accessible for your audience.

Accessibility is not just reserved for those that struggle with their sight many people struggle to read overly complex fonts, making it difficult for people to access key information about your product or service. A simple way to achieve this is sticking to widely available fonts, as users will likely be familiar with them. Secondly, you should chose fonts that are considered easy to read. Simpler fonts are considered easier to read than complex, decorative fonts. There are fonts that have been created with accessibility specifically in mind, such as Tiresias, which was created by the Royal Institute for the Blind.

2.Stress Test Your Brand Colours.
The most common usability issue that I’ve seen come up in branding is the lack of consideration for accessibility in colour palette choices. When choosing a colour palette for your brand it is important to consider the contrast in colour pairings. Ensuring that there is high contrast between colours makes it easier for users to understand your content. If you are unsure about meeting colour contrast requirements there are lots of tools available such as  https://colourcontrast.cc/ and https://randoma11y.com/

Further to this, it is also important that you consider colours for warning, error and success messages and notifications. The colour palette must be flexible to convey the right tone to users, alerting them to positive and negative messages.
 3.Consider Your Choice Of Language.

When thinking about your straplines or content for your service or product proposition, make it understandable. Using simpler language isn’t ‘dumbing down’ your brand, it’s creating an inclusive space for everyone to understand your product or service.

4.Don’t Make Assumptions About Your Audience.

No brand is ever complete, it evolves and grows alongside your business, therefore it’s important that it is revisited regularly. A great way to ensure that your brand remains effective is to conduct regular user testing and focus groups.

User testing can offer some valuable insights about how your brand has changed over time and whether the messages and visuals you launched with, are being recognised amongst your target audience

5.Unite Your Branding And UX Team. 

The best way to ensure that you have achieved the right balance of visual design VS UX design is to bring both teams together to collaborate. Here at Uplift, some of the best work we do is when we can collaborate with brand designers to ensure we are presenting brands in the best way, whilst being considerate to the needs of the audience.

If you like to learn more about considering UX within your brand, please get in touch with our design team.