Being major music nerds, we were excited to be engaged by the design team at Output, the rapidly-growing music software company based in LA. Output was founded by a group of professional musicians and sound designers on a mission to make music creation more accessible, exciting and inspiring. We can't wait to see and play with what they do in future.
Output already knew they needed to define clearer design principles for their flagship product Arcade. In talking with the team, we recognized that there was also a desire to align all Output's customer-facing touchpoints through a consistent, holistic experience. This is precisely the sort of challenge that Supermoon loves tackling, and one that in truth, most digital product companies still wrestle with. A deeper strategic approach, starting with creating meaningful experience pillars, would ensure the brand's purpose would be at the heart of all future design work.
The primary purpose for design principles is to give the design team a formalized structure for design and experience-related decision making, ensuring quality and consistency in delivery. They're critical to achieve and maintain a great brand experience with a digital product–helping everyone understand not just what works functionally, but what "on brand" looks and feels like. They can be high level and directional, with sub-principles getting more tactical. Or, other formulations, they can be highly specific and prescriptive. Likewise in the brand world, when elaborating visual identities, designers often develop a set of strategically-aligned principles to guide the extension of the brand idea through all touchpoints and allow for future scaling.
However, because they are inherently process-oriented, when it comes to unifying a brand beyond a singular product or brand identity system to all digital and customer experience touchpoints, they can hit limitations. In many internal teams, they're often devised by the product design team with a specific set of usages in mind, and don't automatically scale to the entire range of brand touchpoints. It's essentially the flipside of the 2000s transition when we had to translate static branding into digital environments it wasn't originally designed for. Over the last 10 years, we have started seeing digital considerations (like e-commerce click-through rates) driving broader brand decisions, rather than an integrated approach. Quite often what ends up in the brand guidelines will be generic best practices all digital products should aim to achieve, meaning they aren't always aligned with the brand's actual core values and purpose.
This is where strategic experience thinking comes in.
For UX, CX, and service design specialists, the concept of experience pillars (aka experience values or experience principles) is not new. Experience pillars define the broader set of interactions everyone has with the brand, so in many ways ARE the brand from the customer's perspective. They are different to "brand values", and closer to "brand behaviors", in that they are more explicitly outcome-oriented, rather than broad statements of principle.
As a brand-focused firm with deep digital expertise, we see two challenges companies in the 2020s face that experience pillars can help resolve.
Firstly, in aligning the brand, marketing and product design teams in service to the same overall experience goals, no matter whether they're designing a digital interface, a physical product, or a series of in-person customer interactions.
Secondly, and critically, in ensuring that what makes the brand unique and powerful is revealed in the audience experience. A good example of this is Shopify's Experience Values. For Shopify, a great customer experience is their brand. Some of their stated experience values help define what makes Shopify different: "Shopify experiences should feel like they were created with the highest level of craftsmanship" is not a value you'd necessarily expect to see with Amazon, for instance. "High levels of craftsmanship" is one way to help differentiate Shopify from a major competitor, and also help the team recognize when an experience feels true to Shopify's overall brand purpose.
It's no secret by now that a persistent drive to commodify certain parts of the user experience (with good intent!) over the last decade has led to different organizations, with entirely different positioning, building brands that look and feel essentially identical from a customer perspective.
For leaders who are looking to cement a powerful position in the market, create real-world impact, and drive higher customer loyalty, building an intelligent, authentic, differentiated brand has always been a critical factor for success. Today, that means not just "looking and feeling" different, but a strategically differentiated brand experience.
It should sound like common sense, but copying others has never been the way the most impactful companies think or succeed. A century of successful new companies as influential as Disney, AirBnB, Apple and Nike has taught us an important lesson. Organizations planning to be in it for the longer haul are strengthened both internally and externally by meaningfully differentiated brand experiences alongside their product differentiation. It's even more essential now for ambitious founders to embrace this truth.
