Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

ISN’T THE STORY SOMEONE ELSE’S JOB?
You might think that the story of your product is told primarily by its branded elements,
such as the company logo; other branded graphical elements, such as color schemes; and
its content—that’s for the marketing team, content strategists, and visual designers to work
out. For sure, brand imperatives and the content the company provides are key elements of
the storytelling your product does—they set the tone. The branding design elements are
the first layer of tone. But your interface design is also vital to any product’s story. When
you design a dynamic, moving, smart interface, you play the role of narrator. You will also
generally be responsible for the actual narration about how to navigate the site, writing the
copy used for labels and input boxes, such as “Enter billing information” and “Click here
to move to shopping cart,” to use two pedestrian examples. As I’ll cover later, the skill
with which you write these directives and explanations can have a great deal to do with
how effective the story you tell is.
In terms of the brand story, it’s for sure that you are always going to be designing for
a brand, whether it’s a big corporate product group or a not-for-profit, a government
organization, or a university. They will all have a brand story that your product must be
telling, and this will both constrain and guide you, as I described regarding my work on
the Wall Street Journal apps. At the Journal my work always had to be sensitive to the
company’s old and well-established brand identity. The phrase “business news and
designs” still rings in my ears, but the truth is that having a strong brand story was really
helpful.
You never want to violate or interfere with brand messaging in any way in your
designs—and they’re not likely to be approved if you do. For some products, you need to
be very careful that your interfaces don’t overpower the content. With a brand like the
Journal, the content is king; anything too flashy that distracts from that is just not going to
fly. For other products, like a new app, your interface may be a big part of the content. For
example, Sleep Cycle is an alarm clock app that analyzes people’s sleep patterns. The app
was designed with some thoughtful UX that tells its story—which is that it wants to help
you get good sleep—with nice touches, such as the screen going dark when it comes time
for you to go to sleep at night. In the daytime the app is filled with informational and
utilitarian interfaces, such as the familiar scrollable clock dial for setting alarms (also used
in the stock Clock app from Apple), and a graphic portraying when you were in deep sleep
or more restless sleep during the prior night. You always have to make your interfaces
consistent with the brand message and personality, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be
really creative within those bounds. And sometimes you’ll have a good deal of latitude.
With work for startups, which are just building their brand identity, you usually get
the opportunity to help substantially mold and shape that identity with your product.
You’re still given detailed requirements and marketing material to guide the design, but
you have more influence to suggest innovations. You might also be involved in helping to
rebrand a company, as I’ve been at Yahoo. The overarching directive for my team at
Yahoo is to make each app use images in an interesting way to give the products a more
luxurious feel. If you look at Yahoo Weather, which won an Apple Design Award for
2013, you’ll find a wonderful selection of photos of your location depicting the
appropriate weather conditions, which we’ve crowdsourced from Flickr users, displayed