Brand Guidelines Are Ruining Your Website

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Buying World show, the longest running web design podcast where we talk about user experience, design, conversion, optimization and working on the web. On this month's show, we're going to discuss how brand identities are commonly undermining usability, accessibility and readability. Because I'm a grumpy old man. As well as why top task analysis is one of my favorite research tools. My name is Paul Boag. Joining me as always is Marcus, newly married, Lillington. Hello, Marcus. How you doing?

Speaker B: Uh, very well. Look at me, I'm all tanned and underneath as well. Um, just before we go into the important stuff of weddings and holidays and all that kind of thing.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: This, today's show I think has been the first time that all of the content I'm actually interested in,

Speaker A: that's. How many years have we been doing this? I think we've been doing this podcast since 2005.

Speaker B: So you know, you know, or I have something to say on it's fair. That kind of stuff. But yes, no, I, we. Well, you were there, Paul.

Speaker A: I was. I ate your food and I drank your drinks. It was very nice. And what was, what was really disturbing to me, I sent it to you at the day, but you were so out of it that, um, you were, uh, uh. I don't think you took it in. I cannot believe that that is the first time I've ever seen you perform live.

Speaker B: I know. Well, I don't do it very often these days, but yes, there was a few songs done.

Speaker A: You, you. Do you. I know you don't normally sing.

Speaker B: Mhm. Well, we normally sing backing vocals.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. I think you're a much better singer than you think. I can't believe I'm giving you compliments. This is not natural. But, um. No, I thought you were really good.

Speaker B: Thank you, Paul. Much appreciated.

Speaker A: Can I say something? I actually think you were better than the lead singer in your current group. Don't tell him that.

Speaker B: Oh, Phil. I wouldn't worry about Phil. Phil. The chances of Phil ever listening to this. Yeah.

Speaker A: Are like zero. I figured I was pretty safe.

Speaker B: Yeah, I know. I'm gonna get pregnant. Would be.

Speaker A: Although the other band that played were remarkably good. Much better than you lot were. So.

Speaker B: They were superb. Yeah. Plug for them. If anyone's, uh, in the south of England and wants a, a band for a function, they're called the Lettuce Heads. They've been around for years and they are top level professional. They really were absolutely wonderful. And I used to sing Ian, the lead singer, who still looks I mean, up, um, close. He doesn't. Neither do I suppose, but he looks and kind of acts like he's in his 30s. He's, you know, he's a presence on the stage, he raps and all this kind of thing. He was 60 last week, so he's just beat me to 60. Uh, but yeah, we both used to play. He was the backing vocalist in the in the Breathe days. In the in the Breathe band that went out live. Dave was the lead singer and Ian was one of the backing vocalists. Uh, so that was very nearly full 40 years ago, as I said in my speech, when we were both five years old.

Speaker A: Yes, exactly. So I know you've told me this, but where did you go on honeymoon?

Speaker B: We went to Italy. We went to Sorrento and we went to a town on the Amalfi coast called Maori.

Speaker A: Um, very nice. It looked like you had a really good time.

Speaker B: It was stunning. Yes, absolutely amazing. It was very, very hot, um, and very, very humid as well, which I wasn't expecting. It's sort of like, you know, like really sticky. But you do have the, you know, the bonus of being able to just wander into a swimming pool whenever you feel like it or your air conditioned room.

Speaker A: Yes, it's very different to being hot and sticky in the UK when you've got work to do.

Speaker B: Exactly. But yeah, we did, we did lots of cool things as well. We didn't just laze about, we did a bit of lazing about. We, we, we're both major foodies and whinys. Uh, so couldn't want for a better place really than.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: Um, but we did, um, we went on a boat trip around Capri. We walked miles up ridiculously steep stairs and you know, the poor old man, I had to keep stopping. Yeah, but, but the views when you got up there were fantastic. So, yeah, we had a brilliant time and.

Speaker A: Oh, good.

Speaker B: And I don't really want to do it anymore. I don't want to come back and do work anymore.

Speaker A: No. Well, you said no, but you said you came back with that first day of school feeling, which. Which I immed allegedly misread because you meant that as a good thing. While my first day back at school were always awful, I hated going back to school. But you're obviously more pro than me.

Speaker B: Uh, well, it was always a case of, um, well, what's changed? Uh, who are these people I haven't seen for a while. Is there anything interesting? Oh, this is different. Which lasts about a day and a half.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So you're you're past that feeling at the moment and, um, back to the. I don't want to be doing this. God.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Well, dear listener, you now know that Marcus doesn't want to be here and has no interest in this podcast whatsoever and wants to go back to. To Italy. So.

Speaker B: Yeah, who wouldn't.

Speaker A: Who can blame him?

Speaker B: I was gonna say you would be the same. I believe I know you shouted on, um. As in you wrote it in capitals. I think I want to retire, uh, on Slack the other day.

Speaker A: That doesn't sound like.

Speaker B: Might have been even stronger than that. It might have been. There might have been swearing or something.

Speaker A: Probably. Yeah, that does sound very much like. But I don't feel like that about this podcast. This is obviously the highlight of my month.

Speaker B: Me going away on holidays meant. Meant that it's. It's, um. You've had to wait a little longer

Speaker A: and you screwed up the next one as well. That's got to be recorded.

Speaker B: Did make me laugh. I've got one day off in August,

Speaker A: and it's the same day to be the day we were recording. Unbelievable. Anyway, let's. Let's talk about, um, some interesting stuff. I've got a thing. I've made a thing. Marcus. I'm m. Very proud of myself.

Speaker B: Claude's made a thing.

Speaker A: What? Claude. Shut up. Right. No, that counts. These days. I vibe coded. That makes me young and trendy. Uh, or a tech bro. One or the other.

Speaker B: Depends what it is.

Speaker A: Well, you see. Yeah, so I am a fan of a technique called Top Task Analysis.

Speaker B: As am I. Oh, you are. So, yes.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Every element of the content of this show, I actually.

Speaker A: Well, I. I didn't know you meant this bit because I didn't know that you were a top task. Right. So for those who don't know, Top Task analysis is a, uh, technique created by a guy called Jerry McGovern. And, um, he. It basically, it's a bit like a survey. So imagine you're sending a survey out and you say to people, well, what do you want this app, this website, this whatever to do, right? You know, what questions do you want answered? What tasks do you want to complete, et cetera, et cetera. The problem you're going to get back is that they're going to list 100,000 different things that would be nice to have. Right? But not all of those things are going to be equal. So, um, for example, you might want to be, you know, let's imagine you were building a SaaS app that was, I don't know, an email, um, email marketing tool for sen. Sending out bulk emails. One of the things that people might want to do is to tag people, right, that are subscribed via your system. But that's not going to be as important as the ability to send an email. Right? Um, so not all tasks are equal, but in a normal survey you don't really get that, but you do with the top task analysis. And this is really, really important. And the example that Jerry McGovern always used to give, uh, was when he worked with Microsoft, the Microsoft Office team, that they had this knowledge base that answered every conceivable question anybody might have about using, um, the Microsoft Office suite. And they had a really low satisfaction rating that they tracked on this knowledge base. And so they doubled down and they answered even more questions and went to even more detail and their satisfaction rating went down even further. And Jerry came in and said, well, the problem is, is that people can't find that, you know, 80% of people want to find 20% of the things on that knowledge base. And those top tasks are buried because of all of these small tasks that you're answering. So that's where top task analysis was born. And I use it all the time for information architecture, for, you know, dashboards, for, um, building out functionality within SaaS, apps, all of that kind of stuff. But it's a bloody pain in the ass to do, right, because you have to do it in multiple rounds. First of all, you have to go and gather all of the tasks that somebody might want to do. So you end up with a big old list of tasks and then you have to get people to vote on those tasks and in terms of which ones are most important to them.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: So I got fed up with doing it. Um, and of course, me, being the lazy bugger that I am, is always looking for a quick way to solve the problem. So I built an app, um, and I'm really tough with it. So essentially what happens is you kind of seed it with an initial list of tasks someone might need to do. And I typically either just ask AI to come up with a load of those, or I will maybe ask the customer support team.

Speaker B: I asked the client.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, I'd ask the client as well. Yes, obviously. But internal stakeholders. And so you end up with, uh, an initial list. But the great thing is with this app, ah, is that you don't need to get that list perfect. Right. Because what, what my app does is it enables people, as they go in and they're presented with this very long, intimidating list of tasks. Okay, they can search on the thing that they want, right? And if, if it's there, they could just select it and go, yeah, I want that thing. If it's not there, they can just add their own suggestion and then that gets added to the list that everybody else sees as well. So it grew and I have added in, I've even added in profanity filters so that uh, uh, if they decide to write sweary things in, it gets picked up. Um, and also you can see it in the back end and remove stuff that way. So basically users, um, can only select five tasks that the five most important to them. Then they're taken to a second screen where they then can sort them in the order that matters to them most, all in one go. Um, and then you've got this interface in the back end that allows you to see everything and manage stuff and go in and merge things where people have said the same thing but in slightly different ways. You can merge them together, all of that good stuff. And because I am so old and I remember the good old days where we used to give away what we learned and what we did for free. I'm just making it free. Um, I'm not, uh, you know, I did, I went, oh, should I monetize this? Should I, should I charge people for it? And then I thought I can't be asked. So, um, there will be a link in the Show Notes where you can just go and try this out for free. I've only made it free for people that are signed up to my newsletter. But if you're not, just go through the process of using the app and it'll ask you if you want to sign up and then you can go and um, use it as much or as little as you want. But have a play with it.

Speaker B: I'll have a play with that, Paul. I mean, I was thinking of an example. Pretty much every survey we do, you ask which, how would, which of these following descriptions best describes you. And then you go in to do top task analysis. So then you get the top task analysis by user type. Yeah, really helpful.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's in there. You um, can do that.

Speaker B: And one of the. We kind of kicked this a long time ago. We did a website for Southampton General Hospital or University Hospital Southampton or whatever they're called. I've just literally gone and checked to see if it's still there. If you go to University University, uh, Southampton Hospitals Trust, you'll see there's eight, eight links at the top of the page under the main Nav. They are the top eight. Yeah, um, top, uh, tasks for I think inpatients and outpatients. We didn't include staff and all that kind of thing. So they're most uh, important groups and they're still there eight years later. So it's a, um, it's a fine thing to do. Sorry.

Speaker A: Yeah. And you can't do this with the normal survey tool unfortunately, because that's my. I always just, you know, kind of bodged it with a survey tool. But the trouble with the survey tool is you can't add new tasks on the fly that everybody else sees. You can't, um, easily, um, uh, then get people to select some tasks that they then have to order. And it was all just a bit messy so it was easier just to build something so you can go and play with it to your heart's content@toptasks.boagworld.com um, and yeah, knock yourself out because, um, I'm, I'm very proud of it. And if you seriously. And this goes to you as well, Marcus, if you have feedback or if there's anything you want changing on it, do let me know. Paul@boagworld.com I nearly forgot my own email address. Um, and just let me know and I'll add it in because it's, you know, it's a fairly straightforward thing.

Speaker B: There was another thing about that. The reason why I wanted to mention, mention the hospital one is we did it with clipboards, uh, and paper, you know, walking around in the cafe at the hospital and all this kind of thing.

Speaker A: Yeah. In the olden days. That's not, that's not about. That's a good way of doing it I still think. But you know, it's not always feasible, is it? Especially these days, unfortunately. But yeah, so that's, that's that I've also in the show notes, which will be at boag.world forward/037. I think we're on M. Um, there is also an article that I've written about top task analysis and a kind of step by step guide for using this app and that kind of stuff. So there'll be, there'll be the actual app in there in the show notes. Um, and there'll be this guide as well. I think the guide is actually linked to from the very first paragraph on the actual app as well. So you can check that out. Cool. I want to talk about that more because I was really excited by it. Um, because I could build a thing I haven't been able to build A thing since about 2010. I don't think it all got too sophisticated. Yeah. Anyway, let's move on. So the next bit is, um, ranting time. Um, I haven't done a good rant for a while, so I felt like it was time that we did a rant. Um, can we put the explicit tag on this? Uh, I am fed up with bloody brand guidelines. So I thought I'd talk about that, um, a little bit. Um, because it seems to come up a lot recently and I don't understand why this has to be so complicated. And I've just had enough of being forced to obey brand guidelines that were really designed for a brochure, a business card or some kind of presentation. It just pisses me off so much that I'm done with it. Um, and especially these days when the web is the place where most people experience a brand, yet it still seems like it's treated as an afterthought. And most branding agencies seem to be print led and they mock up a web website, which is the. Puts the fear of God into me every time I hear that a branding agency is going to do that because you know it's going to be a train wreck. And then, and then even once that's done, you've then got the branding police that, that come in, the person that's made responsible for the brand and they blindly protect all those brand assets whether or not they result in an unreadable, inaccessible, inflexible or badly optimized website. They don't care because it's in the brand guidelines.

Speaker B: So, yes, yes, Paul, I agree entirely and I think it's fair to say it's not the only thing we do. Obviously we do a lot of development work as well, but we have sold ourselves as brand interpreters for digital for the last 15 years. Um, uh, and we, and some of the things that we're going to come on to. I don't quite see eye to eye with you on, Paul, but basically I completely agree that branding agencies, not all branding agencies obviously, but there is a focus on the traditional side of branding, which tends to be around messaging and logos and really obviously kind of examples of what other thing that is related to a brand, like a logo. Um, and even, but even logos are a classic example of your, your very fine, detailed, swirly square logo is probably not going to work online. Um, yeah, um, but I'd also talking about logos, I've got to be a bit careful on this. This one. Somebody told me about this client. Um, obviously not one of Ours, uh, who, uh, who are related to, who do stuff that's related to the blind. Ah, a new logo developed for a sub brand, uh, that basically fails all contrast. Um, and it's like. Oh, come on, it's a perfect example of what we're talking about here.

Speaker A: Yeah. Because don't get me wrong, I'm all for consistency, right? Yeah, but consistency of a poor experience isn't really much of an achievement, is it, really? And I really like, I like your uh, positioning there. You're not saying we're a branding agency, you're saying we can take an existing brand and adapt it to work in a digital environment. And I think, ah, a lot of the time that's what's needed. Part of the reason why people um, are so rigid about their brand guidelines is because it took them so long to get the bloody things signed off and it costs so much to go through a redesign that they don't want to do that. And I can totally understand that, but that doesn't mean it can't be adapted to work better on, on, on, um, the Internet. Yeah. I mean even, even if you just take into account the fact that a lot of brand guidelines give you pantone numbers as the basis and then they take the hex value straight off the pantone number, not taking into account that you're suddenly going from something being printed on a page to project it in your eye with a monitor. And the color just interprets in a completely different way. So those two colors can look totally different to one another.

Speaker B: You know, I have to tell you of a horror story, Paul. Um, when we have done over the years, let's say two or three or four proper branding projects where we've done logos and we've done print material and mugs and all that kind of thing, we, um, were doing, we were doing, designing a PowerPoint presentation. Um, and this is for. Again, I'm going to be careful about what I say here, but the client, A lot of what they did, uh, but this is, you know, this is over 10 years ago. Uh, a lot of what they did, they would print everything out. So if client, if client created a PowerPoint, they would print the PowerPoint out, of course. Uh, because that's what you did back in those days anyway, so. And of course big wig client person is testing our, uh, the new design we've put together, uh, and printing it out and holding out to his screen and going, that's not the same. Um, and um, so anyway, we're trying to make the argument that you Know your printer will print the, this differently to the one down the hall, which they did eventually concede because they did that, but it's still not the same as the one on the screen. Uh, anyway, so the horror story is me and Lee basically testing, testing, testing, testing, running, doing, trying to find the, the closest match of the, you know, the agreed color for the brand to a printout across a bunch of printers. I don't think we've done one since.

Speaker A: Uh, I have just noticed that you, you actually have put in the show notes the name of the organization that we shouldn't name. So I could drop you right in it at this point. You could, because I know it, but

Speaker B: I edit this, so.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that's true. So I think what, what the basis of my argument is is that your brand should serve your organization and its audience. So the moment its rules make the website harder to use, those rules need to be changed or at least adapted. I'm not saying you just throw them out and start again, but that's got to be the basis, but interpretation for

Speaker B: the, for whatever the brand is being used on.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's what it's about. And the other thing that I think frustrates me a little bit about brand guidelines, at least not all branding agencies. I'm sure that some are better than this, but we do so much work as UXers, like understanding user needs, doing user testing, doing user research. But it still seems that most brand identities are pulled out of some designer's ass, um, and that they're not in any way validated. Um, and that's one of the things that I love about the idea of having what I call, um, uh, digital first branding. Right. Um, is, is you can actually test your brand with real users and do semantic differential surveys and get feedback and all of this kind of stuff, um, before you sink a huge amount of money into rolling out your design across print. Right. So you can get it right in digital first and experiment with it and then roll it out of a print. But no, we don't want to do it that way. So let's lay out as clearly as I can why print first branding breaks online. Let's be specific about what the problems are. Problem number one is it presumes a fixed canvas when the Internet is an unknown canvas. Websites might need to work across phones, laptops, large monitors, zoom levels, different orientations, all of that kind of stuff, which immediately causes problems when it comes to something that's been designed primarily for print. Number two, print resolutions become screen rendering. So all of these things that are, look great in print can look absolutely horrendous online depending on the device. You know, if you're using a retina device, you know, with like, or an iPhone or whatever, then great, wonderful. But if you're using a shitty monitor, you're gonna. Those. That detail in the logo, like Marcus said, is gonna break out up. That delicate typeface is not gonna be difficult. Those complex images are gonna collapse at smaller sizes and just not work work. I've already ranted about number three, which is pantone. Numbers do not work on the web. Um, and that color appears differently across devices. What actually happens, if you want to know the science of it, is when something is projected at you through a monitor, the colors tend to push to even either end of the spectrum. So a light color will become so light it's almost white, and a dark color will become so dark it's almost black. Unless, of course, you have a beautifully calibrated, uh, monitor that only designers have. Um, and then there's all the fact that a kind of a print design doesn't take into account the interactive nature of the web, that a website needs states and components and forms and navigation and error handling and focus indicators and calls to action. And most traditional guidelines do very little to say anything about that kind of stuff. Or even worse, they have a limited number of colors and layouts and that kind of thing that actively stop you being able to design within those, uh, different interactive elements. Um, and then, you know, also with, with print material, at least to some extent, you have control over, um, the environment. Not entirely, but what I mean by that is that when people are using a website, they may be viewing outdoors in, you know, bright sunlight. They might have a poor connection, they might have tired eyes, they might be using assistive technology, um, they might be distracted by everything else that's going on on their phone around them. It's not the same as reading a brochure, for example, or, you know, that kind of thing. Um, and then also in print, everything is, is very controlled and, and so you can create these really polished examples that look really good. But online content is changing the whole of the time, right? So it's getting rewritten, pages grow, translations expand. You know, if you've got multilingual, multilingual versions, um, or as teams add new components in, the brand has to survive actual use, not merely how it looks in a nice launch deck.

Speaker B: So on that particular point, I think web designers can also fail on that point. Oh yeah, they can, because you one tends to Design using a set handful of content.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah.

Speaker B: And that all gets signed off and agreed. And then it has to be applied across a very wide, a much wider, um, you know, bucket of content. And. And then suddenly you see that, oh, it doesn't work here. Or another classic one is like little bits of animation that always appear on a page load or something like that, which will look wonderful and look really impressive when you're showing it to the, you know, the, the director of this or that. Uh, but when you're actually using the website and you're clicking from one page to another.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Smash the screen after six pages. Because it's doing this animation every time.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So, yeah, so, yes, I think, yes, that is definitely, uh, the case here. But I think it's also the case for web designers as well.

Speaker A: So I thought I'd throw out a few, um, common symptoms that I see. This is all just a. A structured rant, basically. Um, I seem to keep coming across a lot of brand identities that have walls of capital letters. Right. I don't mind using caps for, uh, you know, small things like tags or, you know, or eyebrows, as they call them, which always strikes me as the most ridiculous name in the world to call anything. But anyway, um, that's fine. But when you start having blocks of text in all caps, which I've seen sometimes. Oh, that's painful. It just slows reading and is bad. And I don't know why branding agencies do that, because it's just as bad in print. But it seems to be a thing that.

Speaker B: Impact.

Speaker A: I've just.

Speaker B: Impact.

Speaker A: Impact, yes. Let's just shout everything. That's always the answer, isn't it? Um, then there's brand colors that, um, use, uh, combinations that have got terrible contrast. That's probably the most common one that I think you see on that.

Speaker B: On that one, I'm not sure. I think it's Lee. He's saving, uh, you know, keeping track of all of the products that he buys that have appalling contrast.

Speaker A: So. Yeah.

Speaker B: Why. Why is that not a thing if, you know, on a shampoo bottle, why?

Speaker A: It is a thing. It is a thing. It's just. Nobody bloody enforces it.

Speaker B: Okay. Well, I guess. Well, that's my. That's my. Why is it not a thing? Because obviously it's a thing online. Um, you know, but.

Speaker A: But it's got legislation to support it and everything.

Speaker B: Yeah, because, you know, WCAG and, um. Yeah, whatever the one in America is called, it's not just online. So why, why. How do the. These Companies get away with it.

Speaker A: It's darling. I know, I know. Anyway, um, then there's decorative typefaces that become illegible on smaller screens. I see that one quite a lot. Um, logos that only, uh, work when they're enormous. Although, have you seen these responsive logos? Now that's clever. Where. When it's bigger, um, is more complicated, but as it goes down, the logo simplifies and it's just.

Speaker B: Oh, yes, yes. I think we did do one. Or was that. Yeah, it was a fist with a, uh, a sort of a circle around it with wording in it. You just couldn't read until it got bigger and then. Yeah, so then the wording appeared. Yes.

Speaker A: Yeah. See, that kind of thing's great. Yeah, I love that. Little or no typographic hierarchy. I seem to get that a lot recently. And. And again, this is just basic design. But when the headings aren't that much different from the body text and it's like. Well, there's no visual scannability of that.

Speaker B: That's surprising.

Speaker A: I know. What, twice recently.

Speaker B: That's one thing that you would think a branding agency would do really well.

Speaker A: Absolutely, yes. So I don't know what that's all about. Twice that's happened to me recently. Um, restrictive layouts that can't accommodate real content. Yeah. No surprises there. Uh, no visual containers or component rules. So what I mean by that is, when you're building the web stuff, web things, you often need to separate out components from one another. That there's this thing happening here and there's this thing happening there. But the brand guidelines just presume everything is going to be floating nicely on a, you know, a page with a grid system and nothing you. There's no advice around containers, which often feels a weakness to me. M. Calls to action. Very little you get on calls to action in many, um, uh, brand guidelines, which is like. Well, yeah, but they're incredibly important. So they have a primary color that they use all over the place and there's no color to contrast it with for. For calls to action, for example.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, and then guidelines that define specific dimensions. Right. So you've got to leave this amount of space around the logo, you know, two centimeters.

Speaker B: What.

Speaker A: What's that be.

Speaker B: That's pretty rare. But. But it's still that, you know, it just. Yeah.

Speaker A: So what's the cost of all this? Well, obviously it damages accessibility that we've already talked about. Um, and don't forget, accessibility doesn't just affect people with disabilities. It help. It affects somebody standing Outside with their mobile phone in bright glaring sunlight. Or old codgers like, um, uh, Marcus who can't see properly anymore. You know, people like that. Yeah.

Speaker B: Although I had an access, a poor accessibility experience, um, with a link that was shared to me again, I'm not going to say by whom, that I checked out while I was on holiday in Italy, sat on the beach, uh, waiting m. 30 seconds for a video to appear. Oh yeah, and it's. That's got nothing to do with, with branding, but it's just like.

Speaker A: No, you know, that's really common. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: You use the example of designers with perfectly calibrated monitors. I, I had a good monitor, I think ever, but my laptop's got one. But that's it. Slight to the side. The one I'm looking at is an ancient Mac, a Mac monitor. It's to ensure that those very subtle grays that our designers use.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, I can tell them, I can say, look, I can't see it at all and that kind of thing. But the same applies with, from a performance perspective. You've got to be really. We talk a lot about, and you know, people, um, with not great connections.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But I actually experienced it and it wasn't great.

Speaker A: Um, the second one is comprehension. You know, if there's a weak hierarchy can make pages harder to scan and to understand. Understand. The one that I care about most mine is conversion. Calls to action receive less attention. I did this recently where, um, uh, a design brand person said, oh, the button's got to be this color or whatever. So I mocked up in that color, mocked it up in the color that it should be set. Put it through one of these eye tracking studies and like that's losing you 3% on your conversion rate. Are we going to stick with the brand guidelines or are we going to make money? Um.

Speaker B: Did you say exactly like that?

Speaker A: I said it exactly like that, yeah. Because that's how unprofessional I am. Um, trust is another one when there's inconsistencies in brand guidelines. Although oftentimes that's not the brand guidelines person's fault. That's, you know, it's implementation further down the line. Um, I've wasted so much time in projects going backwards and forwards over branding that you think, well, that's just slowing delivery down. It's slowing, you know, time to market down. And, and so it goes on, you know, so it's, it's a real pain in the ass. I mean, to give you a, uh, go, go back into that, that example. I mentioned a minute ago with that home page and the calls to action. So I had a brand compliant version which I tested against a more, you know, flexible version that I'd created using one of these AI attention tools. The revised design produced roughly 20% higher with clarity and focus. Um, but the real killer was the call to action button that improved on the brand Safe version by 80%. And it's like I have never felt so smug in my life. It was, it was a moment, moment of absolute joy. Oh, I'm smug a lot. But you know, I'm not saying I'm

Speaker B: not regularly smuggling first place smugness.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: One of the things you, one of the things you talk about Paul, um, which we have learned to our um, you know we've had painful experiences of trying to do the sort of our um, our um, part of the brand, our brand interpretation, the digital part alongside or as part of or before. Uh, yeah, brand, um, or the, the traditional branding.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And it's never gone well.

Speaker A: No.

Speaker B: So I, I think. But to the point of now we say if you're doing a brand project, note that if you hire us we will interpret that brand which will mean. Doesn't necessarily. Will likely mean changes and examples would be we nearly always change the fonts that um, by the original branding agency and you know, for the reasons you've already said. Uh, and we, you know we might look at adding colors for, you know, for highlighting calls to action, all the things that you've said. Um, so we say that if you want to hire us we will come in and probably make changes but we want you to have signed off the original branding before we come in. Uh, yeah, because if it become, it just becomes this sort of no one's in charge and nobody really knows because we're not in charge. If, if the previous like the main branding project hasn't been finished then we don't really have. Our voice is not really listened to us enough. So we've learned that yeah, get that bit done but also explain to the, the client that if you hire us this is what we're going to do. So expect some changes related to all the things that we've been talking about uh, on the show today.

Speaker A: Yeah and it's that idea I always come back to something that um, I learned from. I can't remember his name. I think it was Neil something in the National Trust when we used to work with the National Trust back in the day.

Speaker B: Neil Eastel.

Speaker A: Wow, you've got a good memory. Where did that come from? He was responsible for brand identity entity at the National Trust. But he worded it this way, consistency, not uniformity. Right. Um, and, and so he, he accepted that a brand needed to change within an, you know, different environments. Um, but it still needed to remain consistent. And I, I've taken that away. And, and I totally believe that, Right. That yes, you might have to change the font, but you wouldn't go from a serif to a sans serif. You wouldn't, you know, you would try and match it, you know, as closely as you could while keeping download size down. Which is the main reason you have to change a font a lot of the time in my experience.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, so, uh, but personally I'm coming round to a kind of digital first approach to branding. Right. Um, and other people might disagree with

Speaker B: this, but this is me, I've just disagreed with that.

Speaker A: Oh, do you disagree with this?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Well, I suppose in the. Yeah, but, but uh, that's. No, no, no, that's what you said is if there is a branding agency that are doing their thing, let them finish doing their thing. Right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Then we do it. So it's not first, then we do the digital stuff afterwards. Post.

Speaker A: Yeah. And, and I can see that if that's the situation you're in. Absolutely. I would take the same view as you over that, Marcus, but I would argue that in some ways there is an opportunity for a branding agency to step up here and say we're going to start with the digital aspects. We're going to, you know, um, because there's so much potential there. So for example, you can start with personality and principles. You define what the organization stands for, how it should feel, what you want people to feel about it. Before you worry about hex values or anything like that. That's a normal part of the, the branding process.

Speaker B: You said they just pull it out of their ass earlier.

Speaker A: They do, but they first of all do ask some intelligent questions. Right. So I'll give them, I'll give them that one. Right. They do do that. Um, but they don't want to focus

Speaker B: on the user, I think is where what I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe that's true, maybe it's not. I don't know. But yeah, I did some.

Speaker A: Yeah. With some then. But I think I would say you ought to bring in ux, uh, and design, uh, digital specialists early. You know, UX designers, accessibility people, content people, people with front end expertise. And these agencies that are doing branding really needs to be talking to these individuals. And again there are some that are doing this, but not enough in my opinion to really understand the challenges there. Um, and I do think in some situations I can understand why you take the approach that you do, Marcus, because from a pure management perspective I'm totally on board there. But in an ideal world I do think a branding agency should be working in collaboration with a digital first agency. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah, I know, I don't, I think in the notes I said I don't disagree or this is how it should be. But I think the problem is, is you can, you know there are great branding agencies out there but hardly any of them will do front end coding. I mean, no, some might. But um, they, they are dealing even if they're, even if they have knowledge when it comes to um, you know, they're not just thinking posters or presentations, they're thinking, you know, mobile design and things like that, but they don't actually build this stuff. And that's why I think that we've taken this attitude of agree all the stuff you normally agree and then hand it over to us. I'm repeating myself here.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Because we really know what we're talking about and when the experience, experiences we've had when we've tried to do it together as a. Again, I'm repeating myself. It, it kind of lost its way a little bit. So that's. Yeah, I guess that's what it is.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, I'll, I'll accept that you've, you've convinced me that you know, I do think and uh, that's fine as long as the brand being produced is recognized as a starting point for digital branding and ah, not, not anything else. That's what it ultimately comes down to, doesn't it?

Speaker B: Yeah, you don't want to have to have um, you know, dumb rules forced upon you. Um, yeah. And yeah, make sure that's, that's not a thing.

Speaker A: So, um, some, just some questions that might be useful. Um, when you're, you're beginning to look at branding, um, is to think about how you're going to go about designing and working on the brand from, from, for screen at the very beginning to, to not gloss over that and not treat that as a secondary situation. But if you're talking to a branding agency, um, and you're thinking about hiring a branding agency, you really need to go in from the very beginning and say, look, this is primarily going to be seen as uh, seen on digital platforms. What's your experience here? Um, you know, when do you bring digital into the equation, that kind of stuff. I also think that there could do with within the branding will be more focus put on the user. As you were saying a minute ago, Marcus?

Speaker B: I think that's a fair comment.

Speaker A: Yeah. And so asking questions about how are you going to get user feedback on this, not just stakeholder feedback, what testing are you going to do with this brand to know whether it's working or not? Or is it just the highest paid person in the room picks their personal preference, which happens most of the time in my experience. Um, you know, and, and, and when you start receiving assets back, you know, put that logo on, you know, what's that logo look like as a fave icon in a browser window? What does it look like if it zoomed, you know, if someone has zoomed their interface to 200 because they've got problems, what does it look in bright light actually taking time to look at that kind of thing. Um, and which elements of the branding you almost want to make a kind of two tier system in your brand. Guidelines of these things are absolutely set in stone. Right. These things can't change, but these things can and, and can be adapted across platforms and that kind of stuff. Yeah. And then I think when it, when it comes to the conversations around uh, branding, it's kind of recognizing where that balance is between we don't want to open the can of worms of changing our brand and actually delivering something that's tangible. Right. And is going to work for the environment and recognizing that you don't always have, you're not going to be throwing out the whole design just by changing some stuff, you know.

Speaker B: Yeah. If you, if you're quick Headscape advert again, um, if you're hiring people who know what they're doing, then your brand will feel like your brand that you signed off before we even got in involved. Yeah, we're just extending it. Uh, yeah, there's no, you know. Well, we're going to change this and we're going to change that because you know, you don't know what you're talking about. That's not the case at all. Um, it's just that there are so many different scenarios that aren't considered, uh, when it comes to,

Speaker A: you know, I don't blame branding agencies for that particular. I know I went on a rant to begin with but you know, they're working within a fixed budget. They're having to look at the brand across all different platforms. They're not going to be able to dive as deep as a UI specialist. So I wanted to end by giving a little bit of advice to people that are maybe in the position of being responsible for digital assets and feeling constrained by the brand identity. The first piece of advice I want to give is don't demand a rebrand. Right. You might as well, you know, shoot yourself in the head. Nobody, nobody's going to listen to that. They probably pay a lot more attention if you shot yourself in the head, to be fair. Um, but you, you know, it'll fall on deaf ears. You're not going to get anywhere but find places where your current brand rules can be shown to be compromising or openly at war with basic usability, basic accessibility and ideally conversion as well. That's always the big one. If you can show that this brand is losing you money by doing like that little AI test that I did. And by the way, the tool I use for that is attention insight. I've mentioned it many times before, but I will mention it again. Um, and then just ask to fix those high impact problems, you know, and then if they, if you hit push back on that, which you will do sometimes, then you say, well, let's do a little test. Let's, you know, do a branded version, you know, a brand, um, conservative brand version and a liberal brand version and let's see which of those two performs best. Because brand isn't the holy relic that it seems to be positioned as. You know, it's a tool for creating recognition, trust and connection. And as long as it does that, it doesn't overly matter if it deviates slightly from what was originally written down. I feel like I've taken a very long time to say a very basic thing in this, which is that just be a bit more flexible over your bloody brand guidelines.

Speaker B: Yes, there you go. I think it's an important topic.

Speaker A: Yes. So that's, that's it. That's really all I wanted to say that, that we need to get over ourselves and I think we need to be braver as digital professionals to challenge brands a little bit more. Not in an aggressive way, not in a throw it out way, but let's see how much this is costing us in terms of usability, accessibility and conversion. Marcus, do you have a joke for us?

Speaker B: I have a joke from Daryl Snow in the bowing world, Slack channel. Um, and it's appropriate because we haven't

Speaker A: had one of him for ages.

Speaker B: Um, and after this one you may not want another one for a while. It's a wedding related joke or marriage related jokes where they go, um, which felt appropriate.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: When a tv, when it start again. When a tv and can't say this.

Speaker A: Please keep that in.

Speaker B: I might do.

Speaker A: Um.

Speaker B: When a TV antenna married another TV antenna. The service wasn't great, but the reception was amazing.

Speaker A: Yeah, I could see that one coming a mile off. But your up of the delivery made it all the much. All the more better.

Speaker B: All the more betterer. Okay.

Speaker A: All the more betterer. We neither of us could speak today. I just dried up mid sentence earlier. You can't get. Although that was a particularly tongue tied.

Speaker B: Um, you practice them because they're so short. Because you.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know.

Speaker A: Do you practice them in the mirror?

Speaker B: No.

Speaker A: Alongside your affirmations. I am a good boy. I am a good boy.

Speaker B: Am I? I was actually gonna say that. Say that earlier. I said I must have. I must have been through all sorts of, um, if you believe in this sort of thing, um, you know, strife in previous lives. Because I've had such a lovely time over the past couple of weeks. I must have earned some way. Yeah.

Speaker A: Either that or you were like some incredibly charitable person in a previous life or something like that.

Speaker B: Yes. That's a lovely thought, Paul.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay. Right, that wraps up this show. Um, thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoyed it. And remember, go and check out my new shiny tool because I'm very proud of it@toptasks.balangworld.com and have fun playing with it. Until next time, thank you for listening.