A transcript of Episode 255 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Margot Bloomstein to discuss our relationship with brands and designing for trust – how voice, volume, and vulnerability impact the user experience.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Bevan Nicol.
Transcript
Per Axbom
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Computer voice
UX podcast, Episode 255.
[Music]
Per Axbom
Hello, I’m Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
And I’m James Royal-Lawson.
Per Axbom
And this is UX Podcast. We’re in Stockholm, Sweden, and you’re listening in 197 countries and territories in the world from France to Kenya.
James Royal-Lawson
Margot Bloomstein, a content strategist for over 20 years, international speaker and author, joins us today to talk about trust.
Per Axbom
Her latest book is released in March of 2021. And it’s aptly named “Trustworthy. How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap.”
James Royal-Lawson
In the book, Margot provides example after example of how companies and civic organisations are renewing the bonds of trust with both customers and citizens.
Per Axbom
Stay tuned after our chat with Margot for our post-interview thoughts and reflections.
[Music]
So when I started reading your book, even in the first chapter in the intro, I realised this is about trust, and brands and companies. And the first thing that came into my mind, was she’s gonna probably going to ask us, ‘what are our favourite brands that we trust?’ And I realised, I really don’t trust any brands anymore. I mean, I used to. There was Volkswagen, and then there was the emission scandal. And then there was Apple, but then I realised how they’re not transparent about the cobalt that they need for their batteries. And so the older I get, the more cynical I become, and the less I trust brands and companies. Is there a way to solve it? Is this the main problem? Are people actually getting more distrustful these days?
Margot Bloomstein
Well, as you said, if the older you get, the more cynical you become, don’t age! We need to adopt a Peter Pan mentality. No, I think that you raise some really good points that I don’t think are necessarily antithetical to trust. Like you mentioned, Apple isn’t transparent about everything. Volkswagen wasn’t transparent, or honest for that matter. But I think if we look at that example specifically, if you look at Volkswagen’s market share and some of the other metrics that we can follow around number of repeat customers over the years – and granted, it’s a long sales cycle there – they haven’t lost market share in the wake of the emissions scandal, in neither the US or in Europe.
And that, I think, is very telling about the nature of trust now. It’s that when brands have it, when they have a loyal following, and more importantly, when their audience thinks of themselves as brand loyalists, when they say, ‘Well, I’m a Volkswagen driver,’ it’s really tough to lose that. Because it is no longer just about losing someone’s trust, but now around changing their identity. So if you think of yourself as a Volkswagen driver, you might look at the scandal and say, ‘What were they thinking? I can’t believe they did that.’ And then when it’s time to buy a new car, still go out, and you’ll buy a Volkswagen. And that’s because, maybe they’ve changed but you haven’t.
And I think we see that in the in the political sphere, as well, certainly in the US around, like the last election cycle, the last two presidential election cycles. Because it used to be that if you caught a politician in a lie that it would scuttle their campaign. And certainly in the 2016 election cycle, politicians on both sides of the aisle were kind of playing fast and loose with the truth, and it didn’t change how they’re how their supporters how their followers still supported them. If you thought of yourself as a Donald Trump voter, if you thought of yourself as a Hillary Clinton voter, you still continued to be right up through the election.
James Royal-Lawson
So when we talk about brand damage, what’s it damaging? So if you say that if you’ve already got the trust and these various events that we talked about, like Volkswagen, doesn’t destroy that trust, then where does the damage lie? What damage has brand damage caused?
Margot Bloomstein
I think what we see as far as damage to trust largely exists outside of the scope and purview of individual brands. Which is kind of scary, because it means you might feel like, ‘Well, wait, we’re not doing anything wrong and yet it still feels like our marketing is falling flat, or the sales cycles are taking longer, or just that our messages aren’t resonating.’ And it might be because your brand isn’t doing anything wrong but there’s more of a kind of mindset of cynicism and distrust now. And I think that’s due to gaslighting in the political sphere media maybe not being as engaged and incisive as they used to be in holding politicians to task, and holding brands to task on things.
And I think, because now we’re sort of swimming in this culture of cynicism and fear and feeling like you can’t trust anybody, they’re all out to get you, everybody’s out to make a buck or whatever. And that’s a bit tougher to address. Certainly in an individual organisation, because how can you be expected to shift all of society. But I think that that’s kind of also what designers have always done. We’ve responded to the challenges and constraints, and zeitgeist to say, ‘Alright, this is the baggage that our users are bringing to the table, how can we make things better and more inspiring, and feel more deserving of confidence for them?’
James Royal-Lawson
I suppose, when we think about Per’s examples, they’re like existential damage situations. With the Volkswagen one, it didn’t actually affect your experience of buying a Volkswagen. And when Per talks about the cobalt mining operations, it doesn’t actually affect your use of an iPhone. The experience is unchanged. And unless you’re like Per, he cares about these things deeply, so he’s gonna have his brand position over these things affected. But I’m not convinced the majority of people do. And that that ties in what you said about Volkswagen not losing share.
Margot Bloomstein
And I think that even if we can look at those examples, and yes, writ large, Volkswagen has not lost market share. But certainly, we do also see, kind of in contrast to that, other kind of blips when brands have not necessarily lost trust, but they’re caught maybe holding an unpopular political position or kind of promulgating a perspective that isn’t in line with what most of their audience feels. And then you see how people vote with their dollars and say, ‘Well, I’m gonna boycott them for a while.’ And, like in the US, Target is a big kind of very popular brand, very popular store – is like a place where you can get anything from hardware and decorations and clothing and food and all sorts of odds and ends.
And it’s generally a good shopping experience and all. Their website offers a pretty good user experience. And over the years they’ve generally had, I think, a good rapport with their Target audience. But then there have been times where things have come to light, where, several years ago in the I believe it was in the gubernatorial race in Minnesota, where they’re based, a number of candidates were running for office, and they chose to donate to the one candidate that at the time was opposed to gay marriage. And for a lot of people that considered themselves Target shoppers, that were loyal to that brand, you saw how they stepped away and said, ‘I can’t can’t shop there anymore.’
It didn’t necessarily affect their identity, though, and their sense of self because when Target kind of made that right and started making donations, and talking about the donations that they were making then, to other candidates and more socially progressive causes, you saw how people went back to the brand. And kind of over the past few years, organisations like Sleeping Giants have been really good at surfacing those issues and saying, ‘Hey, do you know where your dollars are going when you’re buying that sandwich or shopping at that that craft store? Do you know what sort of campaigns those brands are are choosing to invest your dollars in?’
And it’s caused people to kind of vote with their dollars and say, ‘Alright, well, I’m gonna go elsewhere for a while.’ It hasn’t necessarily changed their their sense of self and sense of identity though. And I think when we dig into that further, there are opportunities to then say, ‘Well, how do we bring people back to organisations?’ And is it just a matter of kind of following the money? Or can organisations themselves kind of open up and say, ‘Learn more about who we are if it helps you figure out who you are. And if you feel like your values align with ours and you do want to shop here, if you do want to learn from us or access services here.’
Per Axbom
Fantastic. So I also started talking about your book there. And what’s appealing about your book and I really loved is it’s so well structured. So it really feels appealing to get into, which I think to me builds trust. And so in the book, you have these like three main overarching chapters, which are the voice, the volume and the vulnerability. And I think what we’re touching upon now was a bit of the vulnerability. But what I want to get back to starting out with the voice, which I think you call the unique, identifiable personality that comes through in everything a company says or does.
And it seems to be that this is where you do have to start – you have to figure out the way you speak, which is really interesting. And you offer up consistency. And even here, you start talking about transparency as well, which becomes a really important theme throughout the book. but, how do you start? How do you think about this? Because sometimes it feels, ‘Am I supposed to invent something? Do I invent a voice that’s not really me, but at least I have to be consistent?’
Margot Bloomstein
It I feel like that’s one of those just fundamental kind of table stakes questions of user experience design, too. Like, first know thyself. And it sort of gets to something that maybe even precedes user experience, like the way we talk about it today, because I feel like in the early days of the web, as we were making the modern web and maybe like late 90s, early 2000s, you know, when most of the web was brochure where brands had a decent sense of self, because I think for most organisations, it was a matter of saying, ‘Well, what do we do in our in our brick and mortar stores, and in our print collateral? Great, now, let’s shove that up on the website and who cares if it resonates with our users, what is even a user? We have customers and whatnot. And, and that wasn’t great, it wasn’t really a great time for the web.
But that was kind of where we started out and, you know, live and learn and do it better. And that’s when we started, I think, bringing more user research and user centered design into the process to say, ‘Well, let’s drag the pendulum back over to the other side now, not just about us as brands, but also, what about the people that we’re hoping to engage? What about our users and all? And you saw how user centered design, user driven design, started to help some organisations evolve. I think that the risk in that – the risk that I saw as a content strategist 20 years ago, and still see today in some industries – is that if we focus all of our communication, as far as how we speak and the topics on which we speak, if we focus that all just around the needs of our audiences, you run the risk of losing yourself in that.
So I think this is an opportunity to bring that pendulum back to the middle then to say, ‘Our organisation, how are we different from our closest competitors? What makes us unique, maybe in terms of the services that we highlight and then the tone of voice, and the look and feel that we bring to it. And I think that that’s so necessary, because otherwise, by all rights and standards, in an industry that maybe is more of a commodity and serves a fairly consistent target audience, every organisation within that industry should look and sound the same if they don’t have a distinct sense of identity.
And I always make the comparison to like the airline industry. If I want to fly across the across the US – I’m based in Boston – so if I want to fly Boston to San Francisco or LA, I could fly JetBlue, I could fly Virgin America (used to be, at least) or United, or there’s a number of other carriers. A lot of them are at about the same price point, same level of service. But I know where I’ve got my loyalty airline miles and all and I know which brand just feels most appropriate to me, where I feel most comfortable. And the way I know that are from the cues on the website, the different experience in the in-flight experience. And the design of the experience, because it is distinct in terms of tone of voice and level of detail, and the look and feel and the overall service design.
And so to get to your question, though, about about having that unique, distinct voice, I think that’s something that serves us, if you’re representing a brand. It serves your target audience, because it helps them say, ‘Oh, this is the right one for me.’ So branding and evolving that unique, consistent voice, it’s something that helps make decisions easier for your target audience. And when we can make decisions easier and enable our audiences to make decisions with more confidence, that takes stress off of them. And I think that’s something that everybody needs right now.
James Royal-Lawson
So, when you hear brand voice, of course, you instantly think about the words, the things that are said to you, presented to you in word format. But you’re talking here as well about the look and feel of this or the visual brand. And you said the experience, too. So the brand experience and all that together then becomes the personality of the brand.
Margot Bloomstein
Right, right. I mean, my background is in content strategy and branch driven content strategy. And before that my academic background is in visual design. And I guess I still think of them very closely related, even if in content strategy, we’re largely executing more through content and copy and then maybe eventually through editorial style guidelines, and those kinds of choices that maybe affect copy more. I think all of this still applies when you’re evolving an identity, when you’re evolving a voice. It applies both visually and verbally. So to both word choice and content types, as well as typography and colour, and the density of information on the page.
James Royal-Lawson
Because if you don’t get the whole personality right, then that’s gonna feel disjointed, I guess. When you’re meeting that personality, you’re gonna think, ‘Well, there’s something a bit a bit weird about this.’ When you’ve got flashing buttons on the website and you’re trying to be a certain kind of calming, comforting brand or whatever. You’re gonna get a tilt in your head.
Margot Bloomstein
Right? And I think we’ve all had those sort of like weird, discomforting kind of experiences where a brand looks one way and sounds another. And you’re like, ‘Why are you you dressed in a suit and using all these, like short, truncated incomplete sentences? What’s going on there?’ And I think that goes back to having some sort of consistent baseline message architecture or hierarchy of communication goals that says, ‘Is it most important for you to project innovation, or maybe being traditional, or being welcoming? What’s most important? And then how does that then guide your word choice, your content types, and look and feel?
And I think when brands can establish that kind of consistent platform to guide their voice, visually and verbally, that’s what helps them evolve over time, it helps their audience know what to expect. It also helps all of their internal copywriters and designers, and any freelancers they use, know how to develop calls to action and imagery that’s right for the brand and distinct for the brand. So that, even when you strip away the logo, you still know who it is, with whom you’re engaging.
Per Axbom
I really like how you bring up the point of breaking down silos to create consistency. Because, that’s the thing – as you grow as a company, of course, people stop talking to each other over departments. So there’s someone over there and someone over there, they’re not talking to each other, but they all have customer facing jobs. And they start speaking in different ways. And if they’re not talking to each other, that would be completely different.
Margot Bloomstein
Right. And I think we can talk about user experience and content strategy and building trust at a very lofty theoretical level, but the magic happens and the good work happens when we then operationalize that and talk about it at a tactical level. And I think – looking at this kind of from a content strategy and a creative direction, creative design perspective – I think the one of the ways that we operationalized trust and look at it from a voice perspective, as far as how do we develop a consistent voice over time, it’s by investing in creating tactical tools.
Like editorial style guidelines and creative briefs, and in visual style guides and editorial calendars that say, ‘No matter who is manifesting the brand, here’s how we’re going to all do it correctly and consistently over time and across channels.’ And it turns out, that’s the stuff that also helps organisations operate more efficiently and save budget. Because when you have an editorial style guide, and you have a visual style guide, and it’s already been approved and vetted by the legal department, if you work within it, oftentimes you don’t have to have legal approve every every outcome of it.
James Royal-Lawson
I guess this leads on to volume as well, doesn’t it? Because there’s a section of the book where you’re talking about volume; volume being how you communicate, how much you communicate, and the length and the detail of the communication. That is the user experience aspect of it – how loud you have to communicate in order to support the user experience. And if you’ve got the style guide, I guess the voice is already there. Then that makes it an easier tactical choice about how, how long to go, how short to go. Or?
Margot Bloomstein
Right, and so to be clear by volume, I don’t mean pitch or loudness or something, but rather just how much. So length and level of detail, again, visually and verbally. So if you’re a brand like IKEA, that’s maybe known for simplicity, and you’ve got simplicity and design for everyone, that kind of democratic sort of perspective, in your message architecture, then yeah, it probably makes sense for the volume of content that you’re producing to not be overly detailed and burdened down by a lot of nuance. Your diagrams should be a bit cleaner and spare. So that hopefully people get past the sort of cliched stereotype of putting together IKEA furniture and say, ‘No, this is easy, and it’s laid out here in in fewer than a dozen steps,’ ideally.
So that if you’re looking at anything from diagrams, imagery on the website, to product description copy, it shouldn’t be burdened down by detail if part of your message architecture is around simplicity, and being welcoming and accessible to everyone. And so those sort of guidelines and values can help determine how much you say to. I Trustworthy – in the book – I interviewed a lot of different organisations and I was struck by when people come to that question of ‘How much should I write? How long should a blog post be? Should we be doing a lot of long form copy? And how detailed should our diagrams be?’
There is no one monolithic answer that says ‘This is the perfect length and level of detail.’ But rather, we need to ask, ‘How much information is enough so that your audience can make confident decisions? So they can make a good decision and feel confident about it afterward.’ Because that’s what builds trust. And it isn’t so much just what builds trust between your user and your brand. But also, how you’re starting to reinvigorate your users ability to trust themselves, to feel confident in maybe the product purchase they just made, or that they got the results that they needed in working with their doctor online, or in getting information from the government.
And I spoke with folks at Gov.uk, when they were going through their audit and removing 1000s and 1000s of pages from the government produced web content. They were in effect saying less is more. We shouldn’t be producing more content and adding more detail to tough interactions with the government. Let’s simplify things. And then in the other extreme, you have organisations like many retailers that if they’re selling a bigger ticket product, like one of the ones that I speak with is Crutchfield Electronics, and they’ve felt and learned by researching their audience that ‘No their audience wants more detail. They want to give them really, really long pages, helping them choose a new stereo or a new camera lens. They want to give them lots of content and lots of ways to sift through it because their audience likes to have more to read. And they want to be able to engage with the content a lot more before they make a decision. That’s what builds their confidence.’ So it’s really about measuring confidence, not character counts. That’s a tough thing, I think for many brands, but that’s what helps us best help our audiences.
Per Axbom
And it’s probably tough for people who create content as well, because sometimes they value their work more if they produce more content.
James Royal-Lawson
Or you’re paid by word. You’ve been paid to make 5,000 words so you do 5,000 words.
Margot Bloomstein
Right, we really need to assess ‘What’s the effect and impact of our work?’ not just ‘How much are we working?’
James Royal-Lawson
I do really love the fact that you’ve got so many examples that are from the public sector. You mentioned them, the UK Gov website. Because, you know, with brands, you automatically think of the classic ones – the Coca Cola, the Apple, all these kind of logo types that we can all recognise instantly in their service. But what you say in the book is that this applies to services and and institutions as much as those commercial brands.
Margot Bloomstein
Right. Well, I think that every year we see surveys about the most trusted brands in different industries, and what brands are worth the most from a trust perspective. And I think there’s value in those kinds of reports. But I don’t know that most practitioners, most CMOS and chief creative officers can really learn what to do and emulate them in their own organisations from those reports. And I think that trust is not just a big logo, big budget kind of thing. It’s a transactional thing.
And unless we operationalize how we create trust, how we foster trust, we kind of lose it to the details. And I mean, as we say in design God is in the details. Well trust is too. We need to get those details, right. As a matter of habit and the choices that we make every day in the content that we’re prescribing, in the calls to action, the taxonomy, the error messaging, the imagery that we’re introducing, the iconography. We need to build those things from a point of fostering trust, if we want the big picture of our brands to also foster trust.
Per Axbom
Wow, thanks. We’re approaching the end of the interview, but I really want you to bring home the point of vulnerability, because I think this is the thing that a lot of companies struggle with. I really appreciate you bringing home the point about the difference between compassion and empathy as welll, in that compassion being that you decide to care, even if you don’t understand the other person. And this whole concept of vulnerability, of course, within a brand and company arena, means that you have to be transparent about when you fail, and things like that. I think a lot of companies really don’t understand why they have to.
Margot Bloomstein
Yeah, I think with what you were just mentioning around compassion versus empathy, we talk so much about empathy in user experience design and, as I was researching some of the examples in Trustworthy, in one of the conversations I had someone said to me, ‘Isn’t that just incredibly arrogant to assume that we could understand all of the nuances and conditions that our audiences are experiencing, and also that we would need to in order to be able to design effectively for them?’ Maybe, instead of trying to operate from a point of empathy, we can instead just begin to have a little compassion for them and say, ‘Even if I don’t fully understand what you’re going through, or the baggage that you bring to this experience, you’re a fellow human and I can respect that and I can respect that you deserve a good experience that meets your needs and helps you feel confident as you go through your day.’ And if we can at least hit that, that’s going pretty far for many organisations.
And, in the book when I talk about vulnerability – to kind of get beyond that as a buzzword -we talk sometimes about vulnerability and interpersonal experience, but not so much from an organisational level experience. And I think that’s because as we look over the past few decades, there’s been a mindset in many industries of ‘Don’t be vulnerable. Don’t don’t expose yourself for being human. I mean, what a huge risk to take there. Don’t expose that you comprise humans who make mistakes.’
James Royal-Lawson
Because then you’ll be eaten by your competitors i you’re shown to be making mistakes. Your competitors will jump on you.
Margot Bloomstein
What a horrible thing. But, I think as we’ve begun to realise, we don’t have to operate like we’re bigger than we are or that we’re so infallible. One of the things that helps endear our brands to our audiences and helps establish rapport between organisations and their customers, is by exposing the very human nature of evolution and learning and saying, ‘Oh, we don’t always get it, right. But here’s how we’re trying to improve, here’s our commitment to you to improve.’
And I think one of the very recent examples of that is if we look at the organisation Zoom. They’ve been in such a spotlight, because they’re kind of in everybody’s screen – they’re in your face, because you’re in their faces, most of every day – and over the past year, they’ve, they’ve been really challenged by that, because their user base has exploded tremendously. They were originally just targeting business users that were supported by IT departments. And then, within a few months into 2020, suddenly they were supporting hundreds of thousands more users, most of whom didn’t have IT departments, because they were people calling in from home or preschool teachers or college instructors, or people that were looking to set up a happy hour with friends or a family meal virtually. And they weren’t calling in with the support of an IT department or anybody saying, ‘Here’s how you do that securely. Here’s why you might want to have a password or a waiting room on that.’
And as a result, they started seeing problems with Zoom bombers and other issues of security. And yeah, the organisation could have said, ‘Hey, you’re using it wrong. We didn’t intend it to be used like this by so many people at once.’ And instead, I believe it came out on April 1, their CEO released this long, mea culpa sort of blog post saying, ‘Yeah, you know, we’ve made improvements, but we’re still seeing problems and we realise we can support you better,. Here’s what we’re going to do, here’s what we’re already doing.’ And it was just a wonderful point of vulnerability, where I think he did everything right. Because he accepted blame in the singular; I think his post started out by saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ And then he brought into credit to people that were making changes, he made that plural, to say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do differently. Here’s how you can hold me accountable,’ and said, ‘I’m going to be holding these different public forums. We’re going to be submitting to an outside review. You can expect these kinds of reports from me.’ And they made things personal, they spoke in active voice. He socialised the credit, but kept the blame personal – and kept the apology personal. too.
And I think that that’s a great way of saying, ‘We’ve made some mistakes. Here’s how we’re improving. And here’s how we’re going to take you along on that journey, too.’ Because it’s by offering that kind of public accountability and bringing the audience closer of saying, ‘Here’s how you can keep tabs on what we’re doing,’ that they’re really leaning into vulnerability, and creating a more loyal audience there, too. And that’s something that we’ve seen, from Zoom from Ted, as they’ve evolved over time, from BuzzFeed – they’re really good at kind of prototyping in public and bringing in ideas or soliciting input from their audience. And I think it’s those types of things that are risky. But when you weigh the risk against the potential for greater reward in the form of a more loyal, invested audience, that’s enormous. And the payoff then is huge, too.
James Royal-Lawson
Wonderful. That’s, that’s a good note to finish on I think now ,today, Margot. Thank you very much for joining us. It’s been great fun.
Per Axbom
Thank you.
Margot Bloomstein
Thank you.
[Music]
Per Axbom
So I feel sort of called out by how Margot responded to my first examples with Volkswagen and Apple. Because she’s absolutely right, in that I still drive a Volkswagen and I still use and buy Apple products. And I’ve thought about this since the interview, that it really comes down to the trust, perhaps, is unbalanced – in the sense that I maybe don’t take everything at face value – but it doesn’t mean I leave the business or service. Because, in those specific examples, the cost of leaving is really, really high. It would mean that I would have to make a lot of choices and spend a lot of money and I would have to research whatever I wanted to move towards. Which means that there are so many parameters involved here when I’m making a decision about not trusting someone, but then deciding to trust someone else as well.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. I is a really interesting example, because you are so invested in Apple and their products. It’s not a simple thing to do – to abandon them or to move on to someone else. I mean, if you instead got really kind of angry and upset with the make of your breakfast cereal, it’d be pretty trivial for you to switch brand of breakfast cereal. You’re not as invested in that brand as you are of Apple. I mean, Apple comes into many different aspects of your life and your family.
So it’s really interesting to see just how important that whole thing of brand loyalty is. And you understand why some of these big organisations really do work on you being, more and more, a long term part of their lives. I mean Toyota, same thing. I remember the first time I bought a Toyota, they joked with me a little bit about how the most important thing is getting your to buy the first one. The sales guy I had was quite amusing – he was quite open about that. And he says, ‘Most people just keep on buying them.’ And I think now, we’re on our sixth Toyota. So, he was completely right,
Per Axbom
It makes sense and as Margot was saying, it becomes part of your identity, so that it’s hard to leave something that you feel is part of your identity. And that’s why it’s a long game. So, I no longer feel as passionately about it being a part of my identity, but that doesn’t mean I leave just yet. That can take many, many years.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, because it becomes a bigger challenge to work out where to go, than to keep on going.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
I wonder as well, when thinking about the brand as a personality – almost as a person – when we think about the aspects Margot has been talking about with voice and volume and vulnerability; when we work with UX, we talk about how people-centric, or putting the user in the focus, doing research and all all these kind of aspects of our work, but I wonder, when it comes to brand, a lot of time we apply brand guidelines, we follow them, we follow tone of voice, all these kinds of things, they’re are stuff we refer to as part of our designing. And it struck me, listening back to the interview, about how maybe we need to be better at literally looking at the brand, considering the brand as a personality as almost a persona in this, this and another actor in the in the designing process and looking how our users look upon the brand better and understand that relationship. So we can design more suitably.
Per Axbom
That’s a really good point, because I think I’ve seen body storming exercises where one person pretends to be a website and the website answers person who’s trying to search for something, and then essentially turns into a conversation. And what everyone has to remember, of course, is that people are in touch with companies, they usually don’t call the specific person at the company, they call the company, and they are in touch with several different people. And if those people aren’t aligned in what they’re saying, or they’re using different vocabulary, you’re starting to wonder, ‘Well, why don’t you know that? Because I talked to this other person, and they know it.’
And as a person having that conversation, you’re treating the company as the person and you don’t really all of a sudden understand how two different people from the same company can have different views. And it’s really fascinating. And it’s so true that, if we start thinking that way, it becomes more clear to everyone involved as well, in understanding why it’s important. Because we love to put down brand guidelines sometimes and say. ‘Oh, we’re following this, but it doesn’t feel personal.’ Well, the personality isn’t you, it’s the company.
James Royal-Lawson
I think it’s exactly the point that Margot was trying to make to us about expectations. And that, if you as a user go to somewhere and the text is too short or too long, it’s because it doesn’t match that brand idea or that personality that you had in mind. So we know that sometimes you can have real trouble understanding someone if you’ve kind of got off on the wrong foot, or if they’re not behaving the way you’re used to them behaving or expecting. So there becomes that kind of weird clash that makes things almost impossible to understand.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And related to that, she actually talks about brands also as human beings when she talks about growth. Because it’s about a person growing from a child to a teenager, teenager to an adult. And as companies grow and become larger, it’s harder to be consistent with that voice. It’s harder to appear as that person. So that analogy actually works throughout, when you think about it.
James Royal-Lawson
I love the whole thing about brand arrogance and that it’s so kind of presumptuous to think that a company will know everything about its customers and users and never get it wrong, or never kind of miss something. So that critical openness and being honest and transparent about when you miss something, when you get it wrong, when you fail… love it.
Per Axbom
Definitely
James Royal-Lawson
Recommended listening for you after this. What have we got, Per?
Per Axbom
We have got Episode 105 containing interviews with Nicole Fenton, Alistair Somerville, and Mike Atherton.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that was an events show with three interviews and Nicole Fenton – she’s a content strategist. Mike Atherton is an information architect. And Alister, well, he does some wonderful work with sensory experiences.
Per Axbom
And accessibility. Yep, just he’s trying to guide us into a future that we as designers haven’t seen yet.
James Royal-Lawson
Like that, Per. Good way of putting it. So show notes for this episode and a full transcript can be found on uxpodcast.com. If you can’t get to them directly from wherever you are listening to us now.
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Where do Volkswagens go when they retire?
Per Axbom
I don’t know James, where do Volkswagens go when they retire?
James Royal-Lawson
The old volks home.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Margot Bloomstein recorded in December 2020 and published as episode 255 of UX Podcast.