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Archive - Edition 6: Branding
To
Overview of Branding Edition
Leading Article and Introduction
- Leading Article: The History of Product Branding at SAP
- Branding Glossary
- Branding – Links and Other Resources
All About Branding
- Extending a Software Brand Language Across the Vendor, the Customer, and the User
- The Brand as an Asset – The Five Evolutionary Steps to Creating a Brand
- Branding Hearts and Minds
- Visual Branding
- Themes, Schemes, Skins, Shells, Bells and Whistles
- Branding – An Unscientific Survey
SAP and Branding
- The SAP Theme Editor
- Brand Adaptation of the mySAP Enterprise Portal
- Branding and Usability in Software Products
- Branding – From the Point of View of a Usability & Design Consultant
Links & More
Branding and Usability in Software Products
By Kai Schelkes, User Interface Designer, SAP AG – 02/21/2003
Marketing, usability, and branding are concepts that are often used interchangeably, so let's start with a short description of these categories:
- Marketing is active, direct communication with customers.
- Usability affects the relationship between tools and their users. A useable tool enables the user to complete tasks as effectively as possible.
- Branding is more subtle. Often it is indirectly perceived by customers and therefore encompasses a wider area. Customers don't just pay attention to marketing campaigns – they also take note of how a company reacts in matters like goodwill, call backs, adherence to environmental standards, settlements, and so on. Branding can be labeled as the sum of all a company or group's perceptible activities (both positive and negative), products, sponsoring, and so on.
The credibility of a brand is thus born out of a harmony with the marketing statements. When the marketing of a corporation promotes its environmentally friendly production standards but it dumps hazardous waste in the North Sea at the same time, it gives the brand a negative connotation; at the very least it is perceived as untrustworthy. Looked at this way, branding is a slow, time and cost-intensive process that can have a counterproductive effect if a company's different activities fail to match up.
Proactive branding is thus just as impossible as proactively conveying personal characteristics. Just because someone purports to be generous, for instance, doesn't necessarily mean that other people accept that to be the case. Mediating (brand) characteristics takes time. The "branding" is successful when the person is seen as generous in someone else's eyes. The central task of branding is to convey these characteristics. The image of a brand is highly complex and comprises a number of aspects, which influence how the brand's values and characteristics are perceived. One of these formative qualities is the product. It is a central part of the branding strategy. Traditional media only convey information and content in one direction. The coordination of this information is controlled, for example, by style guides. In the digital world, the branding stimulus is interaction. Because of that, a "digital brand" needs more than just the use of style guides and their formal layout applications.
The image of the brand is essentially created by the success or failure the customer experiences while interacting with a software product.
At this point, usability comes into play.
While formal aspects can be managed by means of a style guide, integrating the
interaction goes a step further in branding. The company image is not just affected
by the graphic appearance, but also in the contact, interaction, and use of
the manufactured products. The behavior and the usability of the software becomes
increasingly more important than the form and function. Branding must therefore
still cover the conventional areas, without losing sight of the usability of
the software. Instead of limiting itself to conveying a brand message, branding
activities should also aim to ensure that the target group/user of the brand
content (in our case, software) sees the brand as meaningful and useful or useable.
This goal is best achieved by a close interplay between branding and usability.
To produce software that meets branding and usability requirements, the production process must be influenced by the branding and usability teams as early as possible.
Formal aspects like colors, fonts, and logos can changed later with relative ease by using central formatting instructions in the cascading style sheet (CSS) files.
Changes in the interaction sequences of the software, on the other hand, can often only be realized with huge development or tailoring cost, if they are possible at all.
To guarantee integrated software interaction, SAP has chosen an entirely new approach.Optimal operating processes are analyzed from the continually recurring processes in different applications, and a pattern is decided upon that is mandatory for the development process. That way all SAP products can use the same interaction pattern and specifications. Formal branding aspects can also be converted more consistently across all our software products this way.
Outward-Facing Applications
Outward-facing applications, like online shops in the business-to-business and business-to-customer environments, represent a particular challenge. These systems often map business or communicative processes for external user groups and are thus part of our customer's branding strategy. Because of that, they have an understandable interest in having extensive modification options for the SAP interface. Customers want their branding to appear throughout our software. Our applications meet these requirements, in that they make extensive use of cascading style sheets' technical options. These are central formatting files that can help you modify the "look and feel." Thus, the software can be visually tailored for customer branding without extensive modifications to the program logic. The positive response of customers to these options is enormous because they significantly lower implementation and modification costs. They can also be used to modify the "look and feel" and update the branding at a later date.
Example
The following example shows three versions of the same Web application that were adapted by appropriate modifications to changing brand requirements: The starting point is an application has a purely functional design. The second step is to add the application branding using content and style sheets. In the third step, the branding is varied by modifying the CSS and graphic files.
Figure 1 shows the home page of a Web application, based on JavaServer Pages or HTML. This site fulfils all the functional requirements but no branding aspects are included here.
Figure 1: Home page of a Web application as a starting point for modification (large version)
The next step, as shown in figure 2, is to upload content and transfer formal branding features. Cascading style sheets and content have to be integrated, which results in major changes to the JSP or HTML code.
Figure 2: Modified home page with branding elements (large version)
Figure 3 shows the same application with another branding. It has the same
content but a different design style – corresponding to the desires of
other customers or changes in taste. This new branding would be implemented
in most instances by changing the central cascading style sheet file and by
replacing background graphics, logos, and other graphics. Changes in the JSP
or HTML code are minimal.
The changes in the style sheet are effective for the entire Website. The background
is not just gray on the home page but throughout the application.
Figure 3: Re-branding of the home page (large version)
Illustrations 2 and 3 show that with central changes, very different branding styles can be included, if the technical foundations for the branding are oriented toward that.
Conclusion
If branding requirements and usability are taken into account in the development phase, this provides all the requirements for individual visual modification for our customers' later branding.
