Creating a Customer Ecosystem Using Brand Experience Metaphors

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Brand experience metaphors are based on real world interactions and help bring a brand’s nature, character, and function to life. Discovering a brand experience metaphor facilitates effective brand planning based on accurate user ecosystems and can lead to designing effective customer journeys that yield measurable results when planning campaigns and user touch points across channels (online, print, mobile, in-store, app, etc.).

So what exactly are brand experience metaphors? They are real world experience metaphors that show a brand’s identity and role in customers’ lives. Brands today are expected to be much more than simply purveyors of passive products, they must strive to be active participants in customer lives. Brands are expected to be interactive elements that add value and meaning. An experience metaphor attempts to capture the most meaningful brand interaction in order to bring to life the relevance and meaning that a brand delivers to a customer.

What do Brand Experience Metaphors Look Like?

For examples of a couple of competing brand experience metaphors, let’s look briefly at the soda marketplace. Keeping in mind slogans like “have a Coke and smile,” “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” and “Open happiness,” we may choose taking a walk while holding hands as Coke’s brand metaphor. When looking at Mountain Dew—a brand more often associated with extreme sports—we may turn to something more active, such as riding a skateboard or mountain biking.

Brands can be defined by the actions contained within their brand experience metaphorstweet this

 

The metaphor we choose allows us to identify the brand character and provides a launching point for further exercises that will eventually allow us to build an effective customer journey. With that we can align meaningful brand touch points that drive engagement and reinforce the brand’s value.

Turning Metaphors into Ecosystems

Once we choose or discover an accurate brand experience metaphor we can utilize it to take the next steps toward creating a brand and user ecosystem. Let’s walk through the process looking at a completely different brand. If we take the example of Brand X, a product used to combat overactive bladder in women (a syndrome that can be exasperated by drinking too much soda) we may choose watching a kids’ soccer game far from a restroom as the brand experience metaphor. Using that metaphor, we then place it at the center of a diagram to start making an affinity map.

affinity map

Figure 1: Brand Experience Metaphor Affinity Map

As we create the affinity map we want to add similar experiences and think about possible brand touch points that compliment or add value for the customer. We should seek to include experiences from multiple channels within the map.

In the affinity map we can see related experiences that begin to set up opportunities for designing branded touch points that both aid the customer’s experience and reinforce the brand’s value and character. Resulting touch points are then rooted in the user and brand ecosystem and embedded with relevance and meaning.

Metaphor to Marketing Continuum

The next step is to align these touch points across the basic marketing continuum of awareness, engagement, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. Doing this, we begin outlining possible customer journeys. In the theoretical customer journey, we then can lay out the existing brand assets in the marketplace that can be leveraged to drive a truly effective program architecture.

The end result should be a program architecture that is rooted in the brand’s nature as elicited through the brand experience metaphor. The subsequent brand planning then becomes an integrated and meaningful customer engagement strategy that avoids the pitfalls of merely throwing disconnected tactics against the wall and checking the box on the most popular channels.

customer journey

Figure 2: Program Architecture with Customer Journey

Conclusion

There’s a growing recognition that we’re moving away from B2C and B2B relationships toward simply H2H (Human to Human) relationships. In a world where brands become personifications, brand experience metaphors will become as useful in user experience and brand planning fields aspersonas have been over the past couple of decades. It’s been said that a man is defined by his actions; and in the same way, brands may be defined by the actions contained within their brand experience metaphors.

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http://uxmag.com/articles/creating-a-customer-ecosystem-using-brand-experience-metaphors

I Love You, Instagram … but Why Won’t You?

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Instagram is a great product and I use it often. It lets me share stories of my life with friends and anyone else who’s interested. But sometimes, it is pretty challenging to use just one photo to tell a compelling story. No wonder a Google search for “how to make a collage on Instagram” returns over 9 million results.

@Instagram users post collages, but have to use 3rd party apps that don’t offer the same great UXtweet this

To solve this problem and let users share multiple photos at once—easily, simply, and beautifully—I created the prototype in the video below.

 

Read on and learn how I put this together.

Building My Prototype

As a design challenge, I researched, ideated, wireframed, and prototyped a collage feature for Instagram, acting as the user researcher and product designer, developing personas, design stories, user task flows, wireframes, interface designs, prototypes, and usability tests.

Design Stories

Writing design stories is a very helpful agile technique to capture product functionality. They are detailed descriptions of what the users can do. Here are some of the design stories for my feature. Users can:

  • Take/select multiple pictures and use them to create a photo collage
  • Edit photos in photo collages
  • Choose collage templates
  • Reposition and replace photos in collages
  • View collages
  • Cancel making a photo collage
  • Add captions to the collage
  • Add location
  • Tag people in the collage
  • Share the collage

Personas

To try and understand the people I’m designing for, I created a persona to guide my feature development and help me focus on the key problem I am solving. It makes the design decisions less abstract and more human. Below is the persona that I created for this photo collage feature. Meet Lucy:

 

User Task Flow

Some people think of Instagram as a camera and some people think of it more as a photo editing app. Instagram recently added a lot more editing features, but they kept the camera experience very clean. I chose to preserve this user flow, and put my new photo collage feature within Instagram’s editing section. I’ve included my user flow chart below. The highlighted section is the main flow of my new feature.

 

Wireframes

My next step was to visualize my new user task flow. I started with sketches on paper. I had a few different versions, but ended up deciding that the version below was the most promising. After some quick usability tests, I discovered that this version enabled users to create collages the quickest and easiest.

 

Below are the detailed wireframes I developed based on the sketches above. I assumed that maximum of three photos in a collage would be ideal for the first release of the feature, because it would give users just enough flexibility and control to enjoy the process of making and sharing photo collages. This is still a hypothesis that needs more testing. My assumption is based on user interviews, the size limitation of the mobile devices and the ease of use to create something with quality.

 

Prototype

I tested my low fidelity wireframes with some colleagues and created a quick high fidelity prototype to test more. This prototype helped me further test my user task flow and catch any errors in the early stage. I am going to do more usability testing in the future to validate this design.

Conclusion

To be clear, I do not work for or represent Instagram. I chose to do this feature as a design challenge. As an avid and happy user of Instagram, I had a great time working on the project and would love to see my collage feature in the real app someday—given the number of people looking for a way to build collages that they can post to Instagram, I think there’s an audience for the addition.