Designing Your Brand Experience:
Ethan Eismann's Take on User Experience Design and Branding

– Ethan Eismann, Senior Experience Design Lead, Adobe

 

 

 

 

Hardly your garden-variety technologist, Ethan Eismann’s views transcend today’s forms and functions. As a senior experience design lead at Adobe, Ethan digs deep to help create the ways designers, developers and consumers will be working with technology tomorrow.

 

In this interview with Lance Christmann, the chief interface designer at EffectiveUI, Ethan shares his views on one of his favorite topics: the intricacies of branding. He also shares his beliefs about experience design — currently an emphasis at Adobe. Read on and you will understand why Ethan, in addition to being a noted writer, is one of the industry’s important visionaries.

 

Christmann: Well, it’s great having you here, Ethan. To get things started, what is your role at Adobe?

 

Eismann: My role actually just changed a bit. I’m called a senior experience design lead for Thermo and designer-developer workflows. That means I split my time between working on providing design leadership for Thermo as well as design leadership for any workflows that pertain to the process of designing rich interactive experiences. That would include working with the Creative Suite and some of our other interactive design and development products like Dreamweaver, Thermo, Flash and Flex Builder.

 

Before I was in this role and before I was working on Thermo, I actually provided design leadership for the Adobe AIR platform where I was working on developing consistent common design patterns for notifications, for synchronization, for things like “When is the best time to use custom chrome versus the default system chrome?” Actually, I was working on that around the same time EffectiveUI did the eBay Desktop application, so we have that in common.

 

Christmann: When you say that you’re an experience designer, what types of activities does that entail?

 

Eismann: There’s a whole range. If I look at what I do at Adobe … there is the tactical production of actual assets that go into product design. There’s helping various teams understand where — from an experience design perspective — we want to lead our products in the future for designers and developers to work and collaborate better together. There’s also an aspect to my job of mentoring other designers, helping newer designers learn design practices, helping establish good design practices within Adobe, and generally helping people work better/faster.

 

I also communicate with the community. Primarily, that’s my blogging activity. If I could carve out my ideal week, I would spend at least one day with customers, or with people who use Adobe products, or people who are designing AIR applications or rich Internet applications. I would bring that knowledge to bear on the other four days in the office. I accomplish that somewhat through my blog in that I’m able to convey information about what I’m thinking and receive information back from the community.

 

Christmann: I know this is a huge, heavy-duty question that can take years to answer, but what would you define as the general characteristics of the term “brand?”

 

Eismann: I’ve thought about this quite a bit. First, I should tell you my background is philosophy. I don’t have a traditional design, or even a business or marketing background. I got my bachelor’s in philosophy and my master’s in information science, so I tend to think more like Marshall McLuhan than Peter Drucker, or even famous designers.

 

I tend to think of brand as a reflective and consistent, yet responsive system of communication between an entity, whatever it may be — a corporation, even a person, and other entities.

 

The reflective part is about the fact that your message isn’t just pulled out of a hat, but it’s developed through a process, exercise and various practices. It’s not just something you come upon; it’s something that you develop over time.

There are many ways to achieve the right brand. First is being consistent with a message once it’s established. When that message is being communicated by numerous people throughout your organization and across various touch points, the idea is to make sure that the message isn’t never deviated from to a great degree. Everybody within the culture of your organization understands and embodies the message.

 

Every touch point other entities have with your organization is a chance for that brand to be communicated. Consistency is really what that’s about over multiple touch points. That’s one reason Google is so powerful. If you look at the Google Web site, it’s completely consistent. Every item, everything that Google produces, every one of their products has that particular consistency to it and they really don’t deviate from it.

 

The other aspect of brand is responsiveness. While the brand should be consistent, it also has to respond. That boils down to being reflective of what’s happening within society. The economy has changed. Now people want to save on gas and the notion of “green” is huge and corporations around the world are adopting more of a green persona because that’s what resonates with society at this time.

 

You see how the fashion industry is geared towards revving styles on a seasonal basis; and as fashion and clothing styles are revved, those changes become reflected in advertising, what people are wearing on the street and what we see on TV.

 

At a certain point, fashion changes affect graphic designers who then change the way billboards look and then all of sudden it’s time to change your corporate logo because it’s not contemporary anymore. It needs to be updated to better fit what society is expecting.

 

The final aspect of brand would be systematic — having multiple touch points organized in a cohesive manner.

 

Christmann: I agree that Google is a great example because they actually built their entire foundation off their brand. Adobe is also a powerful brand in our culture. Like Google, Photoshop has become a verb — a fascinating phenomenon. As a thought leader and an Adobe employee, what are the meaningful aspects of the Adobe brand?

 

Eismann: That’s an interesting question. When I first started at Adobe, I actually worked on Acrobat and it was really funny to hear customers say, “Oh, I’ve got Adobe.” What they really meant is that they have Reader or that they’re using PDF.

 

Of course Acrobat and PDF and Reader are the words the general population understands to a certain degree, at least the population that computes. But I think Flash is also a really prominent brand.

 

I don’t watch CSI, but my friend Nico Verman blogged about an episode where characters were investigating some code and somebody had created some custom Flash video. It’s interesting when you see Flash Video referenced on CSI. Flash, apparently, is a big part of the Adobe brand.

 

I think Macromedia did a great job of establishing the idea that experience matters, as well as the concept of the RIA. Via the merger, that notion rubbed off on Adobe and experience has begun to matter a lot at Adobe.

 

It’s interesting how things have changed now that AJAX technologies have everything to do with RIAs — and are Adobe’s competitor in the RIA space — with Microsoft having products like Silverlight for creating RIAs. The whole RIA brand is now diluted to a certain degree. It’s not so much now associated with Adobe as Web 2.0 or rich experiences.

 

Christmann: You mentioned community. Adobe and Macromedia had such different customer approaches, yet they shared so many customers. As the merger happened and two brands became a single experience, it impacted many professional lives. What do you hear from the community about the Adobe brand now?

 

Eismann: Let me contextualize my answer. I engage with the community in a number of ways. The first is via my blog and the responses I get back, the comments and private emails from the blog. I also read a lot of other people’s blogs. My news aggregator flows in a massive amount of information about Adobe technologies, our users’ experiences and the whole world of rich interactive experiences. I’m hearing what the community is talking about on a daily basis and keeping an ongoing pulse.

 

As I mentioned before, in my ideal world, I’d be onsite with customers and other people in the community at least one day a week. But I’m able to actually accomplish that to a certain degree when we go on customer visits to talk with them about various ideas for products. That’s my most valuable experience as a designer here because I’m able to actually sit with the customers and engage with them on one-on-one.

 

The other way I’m able to engage with the community is when I attend conferences or speak at conferences. Finally, we do a lot of user testing here. When users come in, they provide feedback on the experience design aspect of the brand — as a touch point for the brand. Is the product useful, usable, and enjoyable; and if it’s not, how could it be better?  Those are all the different ways I try to engage in the community.

 

The information that flows through those channels is often different. In blogs, people are definitely more emotional; it’s more personal. I think it’s also pretty honest.

 

Customer visits, on the other hand, while there’s great information derived, often feel more like a focus group. Sometimes a user’s manager might be there so that the people who are actually using the products may not say exactly what they’re feeling in front of the manager. Sometimes there’s not a representative level of honesty there.

 

I love hearing what people say at conferences. Sometimes I’m the one buying the drinks, so I know people are already happy. I heard about concerns about the merger at conferences. With Adobe being less of a maverick-like culture and less engrained with the community than Macromedia, people feared communication might suffer.

 

But the people I speak with now have been very, very pleasantly surprised and satisfied with the job Adobe’s doing getting out in the community — evangelizing, communicating with community members and being really responsive to the ideas, the commitment and the passion of the people who use our products.

 

I feel Adobe has done a great job bringing over that communicative aspect of Macromedia’s culture, and I’m really satisfied with what they’ve done. There have been great parties at events like Flash in the Can. Not to put that too lightly — sometimes having a good party where people let loose helps everybody spread the message that we’re all here to have fun and create great experiences.

 

Christmann: It sounds like Adobe really values the conversation about brand between the customer and the company — rather than pushing the brand alone. But if customers are used to certain brand conventions and an organization wants to change those brand conventions for progress sake, how do you balance that conversation?

 

Eismann: I’m all for pushing conventions. I’m part of a company that creates products that are used by extremely creative people who always push the boundaries. But when I talk with the community about ways to do what they do better, especially when it comes down to the experience design, one thing I always establish is that it’s important for the inexperienced to follow best practices.

 

Great ideas have come before and standards have been established that really are geared around helping users be successful. Usefulness and usability are key components of an experience brand. But the aspect of an experience being enjoyable is also an important to a brand. In order for an experience to be enjoyable, there needs to be a playful aspect, which may include ways to innovate and push away from conventions.

 

OS X is a great example. When Apple went from OS 9 to OS X, it was a huge change in terms of the overarching experience, but the metaphors remained common. We still work with files. We still work with folders. The idea of the finder is still there. These things maintain the baseline of usability, expectations and consistency. Apple was able to take the brand of the operating system and move it to the next level without sacrificing the usability. And now it’s amazingly enjoyable. The dock and the Genie effect — those are innovations that just make computing better. If people, especially designers, weren’t pushing the envelope, we’d still be stuck in a more static world. We’d still be keyboarding on command lines.

 

Christmann: Apple was able to keep common patterns in such a way that it didn’t feel like it was a feature bloat, or unnecessary additions.

 

Eismann: I interpret Apple’s experience brand as simplicity. They really do weed out all that is not necessary in terms of their package design, their copy and in the applications that they produce. The experience is winnowed down to the most meaningful message, the most meaningful interaction, the overarching experience and really nothing else.

 

Christmann: That’s a good example of an intangible aspect of a brand: simplicity. Brands have those lofty, intangible aspects like “clean” or “innovative.” But the other entity receiving that message often grabs hold of the tangible manifestations of that, like “there are only three buttons in this entire interface.” What design approaches help you translate one into the other?

 

Eismann: Guidelines essentially determine the tangible aspects of your brand. You have style/design guides — like the Flex interface guidelines or the Apple human interface guidelines — which are very, very useful in terms of ensuring that the experience brand is as consistent as possible.

 

I think one of the most tangible aspects of the Adobe brand are the product icons that started with CS3 and are now featured in all of our products. When you line them all up in your dock and see them as a collection, they are a very tangible aspect of the brand. At a glance, you immediately know it’s Adobe. Those icons don’t deviate from the convention and are clear as can be.

 

A more intangible aspect of the Adobe brand is the subtle gradient within each product icon. A lot of people don’t notice, but those gradients are extremely important to the icons. If the icons were on a flat colored background, they wouldn’t be as engaging.

 

Another aspect of the brand is in motion design. Does the scroll bar snap when you’re done dragging it? Does the list bounce when you’re done dragging the scroll bar?  These little touches that make the electronic experience feel more like the real world are these things that are fairly intangible. You don’t really perceive them so much as you feel them.

 

You find that feeling in certain aspects of marketing messages. Sometimes messages just resonate in different ways, like humor. It’s an approach that’s agreed upon at initial design. So humor is an example of a more intangible aspect to a brand.

 

Christmann: Sometimes it’s a chicken-and-egg syndrome where somebody may design a tangible component. You may design something that begins to resonate with the bigger brand, or with customers, and that component becomes tangible. For example, the darker interface in After Effects, where did that come from? Do you sit around talking about intangible aspects like sleek, or dark?

 

Eismann: In my design practice, I start with an approach to solving a problem. The approach is where I make statements that help guide my solutions.

The intangible aspects of design come from the approach because the approach doesn’t necessarily dictate exactly what the solution is. The approach isn’t about adhering to a set of strict guidelines; it’s really much more abstract. As I mentioned before, the approach might be that the experience maintains an aspect of humor, or the experience is engaging in a certain way, or that is as ergonomic as possible.

 

When you begin with certain principles in your approach, you can venture safely into the part of the design process toward the actual solution. You can use those principles to guide your solution.

 

In the case of dark versus light UIs, certain content tends to be more engaging when placed on top of a dark UI. By playing around with luminosities in the design process, if you let the content guide the design, then you really are focusing on the content and not necessarily the chrome. You’re guiding the design of the experience around having that content be first in terms of presentation. Sometimes that UI needs to go darker. Sometimes it’s better for the UI to be a lighter hue of gray to fit better — like a chart or a graph.

 

Christmann: So the intangible concept there is that content is king and it makes its way into a tangible result that may influence the audience. And design approaches like dark, light or sleek make the content engaging?

 

Eismann: That’s right. As I mentioned, one of the approaches that is absolutely a requirement, which is almost never mentioned as an approach, is that experience should be as ergonomic as possible. “Content is king” is — in my opinion — an ergonomic requirement for designs.

 

Christmann: What do you make of the term “branded application” in that the application looks and feels like the colors of a corporation, for example? This term is being thrown around a lot lately with Web 2.0 RIAs. What is your take on that term?

 

Eismann: First of all, I’m trying to eradicate the term application because I feel like that puts the idea into people’s heads to expect something that looks and feels generic, or basic or like something that’s come before. The word application connotates that something got designed by standard approach — or it looks like Flex’s default look and feel, or like Apple’s or like a .NET default look and feel.

 

Christmann: I agree that even the word “software” brings up very specific connotations in people’s minds.

 

Eismann: Exactly. We’re moving into this world where software is running in various contexts on many different types of screens and that work can go just about anywhere.

 

Although the term “application” definitely has its use when we’re talking about experience design, I like to really just use the term “branded experiences” because it conveys a greater breath of possibility. I tend to categorize branded experiences by their purpose, and it’s always a good practice to make the experience appropriate to the purpose.

 

For example, if you’re designing a banking site, it’s a good idea to create a feeling of solidity, reliability — and overarching the experience brand should be one of consistency. But if you’re creating a movie micro site, for example, the experience should probably be more abstract or playful, emotional. There might be a notion of unpredictability.

 

The point is that you want people to engage with an experience, to feel the aspect of the brand. The excitement of the movie site should make you want to go see the movie, not to go back to that application day after day and to use it for a very sensitive secure computing experience or banking engagement.

It comes down to the term “brand experience” being very broad. But it’s important to think about what exactly is the purpose of the thing you’re designing?  Who are the end users? What will they be using it for? That process will help you understand the tenor of the brand you’re trying to design.

 

Christmann: Now that we’re entering a multi-device world, experiences are in transition. I’ve been with Flash since 1998 and have followed mavericks creating breakthrough experiences like Joshua Davis’ Once Upon a Forest site. The result is that Flash helped others open the door to challenging our notion of what web software should be. But now that Web conventions are being redefined, and the desktop is merging with the Web and devices are proliferating, how does one translate to the other?

 

Eismann: I think it’s wonderful that we have such great technologies today to use for design. Over the history of experience design, we found that the Web — and Flash to a great degree — were key influencers on the evolution of the operating system. Web sites pre-OS X had smooth transitions and animations that were engaging.

 

Then the designers of OS X (I think they used Director to come up with the first prototypes for OS X) were influenced by the rich color schemes and the vibrant motion of the Web at that time.

 

All that went into the design of OS X and now everyone with a Mac has an experience that is more fluid and more engaging than any Web site or Web service that people use regularly. From there, OS X influenced Vista because Microsoft had to compete, and now everybody is enjoying better experiences that were essentially influenced by different contexts. The Web context influences the operating system, operating systems influence the iPhone, iPhone influences desktop applications.

 

Christmann: So where do human interface guidelines for a particular device come into play? Do you lean toward making progress through collaboration as opposed to sticking to specifications?

 

Eismann: Yes. Not to overuse OS X as an example, but it’s a good one. A design team made a conscious decision to change the rules. The CEO of that company trusted that team and, in fact, pushed them to constantly rev it and make it absolutely perfect.

 

In a sense, OS X was influenced by one person’s judgment and taste in design. But that person took a big risk in creating a new experience that, despite testing, may not have resonated with users because it was just too different than OS 9. Now, that experience is standard.

 

For a team that’s less experienced, guidelines are phenomenal because the team can get to a useable experience by following the guidelines to the T. It’s not necessarily paint by numbers, because there is some creativity in assembling different parts. But if you’re really good at following directions and guidelines, your solution should ideally help people accomplish their goals or solve problems.

 

Christmann: In art, someone builds off what came previously and sets a new standard. Other people follow, embrace the current standard and continue forward to set newer standards.

 

Eismann: That’s exactly right. We see it in music all the time. I haven’t heard a genuine new sound since I don’t know when. I’m hearing the ’70s and the ’80s combined in new ways and the ’80s and the mid ’90s combined, which is sort of new, but basically these sounds are hybrids and remixes of different aspects of sounds that came before.

 

You see the same thing in graphic design. Graphic designers remix traditional styles to push the envelope to create the new look — the new visual experience to represent a concept because companies need to sell new products. Marketers need to influence people in new and exiting ways so they turn to graphic designers to get there.

 

When you design for use, the game is different. You’re creating a rich interactive experience and there are valuable principles to follow. But because experience design is a new field, it’s very important for us to always try to push to be innovative.

 

When you have enough experience to innovate wisely and widely and on a quality basis, that’s when you have breakthroughs. That’s when something like the engagement of the iPhone emerges or even some of the amazing experiences I’ve seen in video games. Video games are a wellspring of ideas for people who do experience design to take cues — to make experiences more fun, more engaging, more enjoyable and ultimately more productive for end users.

 

Christmann: I think businesses struggle with their brand as it relates to various outlets — like trying to make a brick-and-mortar store fit on the Web. What steps should organizations take with their brand as they branch out to new devices and different models?

 

Eismann: The first step is to blur the distinction between the brand experience in the real world and the virtual world and have consistent guidelines across both arenas. Second, companies without Web presence need to ask themselves what the best way is to get their message out to their market.

 

When it comes down to it, it’s all about understanding customers and interpreting their feedback into some type of digital form. Does it make any sense to have a mobile presence if your customers — for whatever reason — wouldn’t necessarily benefit from engaging with your company on a mobile device?

 

Christmann: Interpreting your customers’ feedback is really important as opposed to taking literal feedback and trying to put that into practice. Different channels have different needs, and the customers may not really know what they want out of the brand in that channel.

 

Eismann: Exactly, here’s a good sort of case in point. I’ve been looking for a new car with my partner. Every weekend she and I will go to car dealerships and we check dealership Web sites across the Bay area. Every one of them has a tab that advertises their latest deals. When you click on that tab you get a list of PDFs, which essentially show the print ads that ran that week. An interesting, but not too effective, mashup between print and Web.

 

Those dealers’ digital brand expression could be revved by an experience designer to create a very engaging screen-based brand that could better reflect their changing business better than their storefront. It costs so much more to buy a new set of showroom chairs or make sure staff iron their shirts in the morning than it does to ensure a consistent message and look and feel on a Web site. But if a car dealership really wanted to make a consistent experience, they would have to do all those things.

 

It’s also part of the evolution of how organizational leaders consider their brand. I really do feel like we’re moving into a phase in the business world where business school students are learning more about what design means to brand and how the two play hand-in-hand.

 

Furthermore, I see a cultural shift in recent computer science grads. New employees at Adobe grew up in the Apple and Volkswagen culture and have been receiving Web 2.0 messages for years.

 

Christmann: I’d like to wrap this up with some comments about your work on Thermo. It seems that Thermo is making the progression from design to technology easier. How do you see that ultimately helping a brand?

 

Eismann: One of the most satisfying aspects of working on Thermo is that it’s a tool that will help designers produce objects that result in experiences that are hopefully a step above what exist today. And they can do that in a mode that makes it easier for them to create better things faster.

 

One of the primary goals of Thermo is that it will enable designers to more easily create better experiences faster. The reason why that is important is that if you give designers better tools, they will come up with better experiences. Others will see these experiences and will be spurred to remix ideas into it to create something new. And so it will go, in the ongoing process of creating more useful and more enjoyable experiences.

 

It’s all about the tool. In manufacturing, for example, costs generally decrease as the technology underneath the process evolves. I think the purpose of tools is to make it easier for people to produce things better and faster. Thermo does that.

 

In the future, it would be incredible to have a tool that allows designers to create a software experience and hardware experience in the same space, the same context. That would certainly be a huge benefit for designing mobile experiences.

 

If it were possible for a one tool to produce the phone as well as its software, it would be an ideal way of working. That’s one reason why I think the movie Iron Man, is so influential. It’s about a designer/technologist creating the tools that helped him create another tool — which was his suit. But the core of that movie was about a man who has actually created the tools that created other things — and evolved the tools that then evolved the main object of his intention.

I feel like Thermo plays in this 1.0 world of tool evolution, whereas Tony Stark in Iron Man is beyond version 100.

 

Just to add one more point. I do think that society is ready for this. One of the greatest things that are happening right now on the Web is this whole culture of easy creation —that is, the ability to remix content and assets from different sites together.

 

To create a robust MySpace page, people had to learn a little bit of code, so they became creative hackers in order to date or have a Web site. You have this new genre of widget platforms where people are flowing content from one form into another in a different space. I feel like the next generation of users encompasses all that as part of their cultural experience. They have no problem putting up a blog, using technology, devices or screens.

 

As Adobe evolves it professional products — like Thermo or Illustrator or Photoshop — it’s important to consider that younger generation who is so accustomed to flowing through a screen. They played video games all day long; they spend the whole day flowing through digital experiences. If we can capture that sense of flow, that sense of continuous, enjoyable engagement into the actual tool, it will never feel like people are working. It will feel more like you’re playing productively.

 

Christmann: What a fascinating business to be in right now.

 

Eismann: Yes, it is.

 

Christmann: Ethan, I really appreciate all of your thoughts today and for sharing your philosophies with our readers. 

 

Eismann: My pleasure.

 

           
About Ethan Eismann
Ethan Eismann is the senior experience design lead of Adobe Thermo with Adobe’s XD team. With Thermo, he is crafting a product vision that will make it easy for designers to prototype rich interactive experiences that can be taken to code. Ethan also works closely with the Adobe AIR team to develop best design practice for the emerging Adobe AIR platform. In his spare time, Ethan operates www.eismann-sf.com where he writes about RIAs and design at large.