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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
Themes, Schemes, Skins, Shells, Bells and Whistles
By Esther Blankenship, Product Design Center, SAP AG – 02/21/2003
Customizing electronic interfaces has become more and more prevalent. These custom designs are known under the terms themes, schemes, skins and shells. This article addresses the subject of customized software and asks whether it has substance or is all just bells and whistles.
A natural and perceptible consequence of the Internet revolution has been the revolution in people's expectations of electronic interfaces. The more wide-spread usage has become, the more exigent the demands. Most people want the Websites they visit to be fast, usable and attractive; these were not widespread demands of electronic interfaces a decade ago. Although speed and usability are measurable factors, they are still relative to what people were confronted with in the past. Of the three expectations, attractiveness is certainly the most subjective, but indisputably plays an important role in people's perception of every Website they visit. Possibly more important that a Website's attractiveness, however, is its visual distinctiveness. The mere profusion of Websites today make distinction through visual design a strategic survival tactic. Color, imagery and layout are invaluable differentiators which help people to distinguish one virtual space from another and recognize it when they come across it again. Sometimes a Websites "plainness" can even be its distinguishing feature.
Assuming you haven't taken issue with the premises laid out above regarding Websites, I'd like to proceed to a related topic regarding another species of electronic interface: software. The question I'd like to investigate in this article is whether expectations of software branding and visual design have also changed in the last decade or so. Does distinction through visual design also matter in the realm of software? Are people itching to personalize their electronic work environments? What about business software running in a Web environment? Are the expectations there different? Will that have an influence on traditional software visual design? Is all of this necessary, or is it just "bells and whistles"? To answer these question, we'll first have a look at the tendencies in software design and then survey the personalization options in the most widely used software on the market, Microsoft Windows. We will then have a quick look at what's going on in the skinning and shelling communities and afterwards move on to what this all has to do with software, especially business software running in a Web environment. Finally, I hope to answer the questions I have posed at the beginning of this article.
Software Today
Most software manufacturers conform largely to the graphical user interface (GUI) design of the operating system (OS) on which the program is running. The GUI elements (such as buttons, dialog boxes, base fonts, etc.) and subtle design cues (such as dimensionality, tactility, color, etc.) in Adobe Illustrator resemble the GUI elements in Microsoft Excel. Generally speaking, PC users expect software running on their Windows operating system to conform to the standard Microsoft design. Mac users, especially, expect the GUI of their applications to adopt the Macintosh design.
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Figure 1a: An Adobe Illustrator tool palette, a Microsoft Excel dialog box, and a Macromedia Flash swatch palette running in a Windows operating environment |
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Figure 1b: An Adobe Illustrator tool palette, a Microsoft Excel dialog box, and a Macromedia Flash swatch palette running in a Macintosh operating environment |
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Other software companies take great strides to imbue their software with a distinctive look and feel. By comparing the two images below, one can easily see that the QuickTime media player from Apple (the makers of Macintosh) has done its best to give the Windows version of its application a Mac touch. If you look carefully, you can see the difference between the two in the buttons and the pull-down menu at the top left. There are also some slight differences in coloration. However, all in all, the visual branding of this application is intended to send a clear message that this product comes from Apple.
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Figure 2a: The QuickTime media player from Apple running in a Windows environment. |
Figure 2b: The QuickTime media player from Apple running in a Macintosh environment. |
SAP does the something similar with its software. Since the Enjoy initiative in 1998, SAP began a concerted effort to maintain a consistent branding language for its software products regardless of the OS on which the software is running. So far as technology allows, the Java and Windows GUIs of SAP's applications are identical.
Personalizing Standard Software with Themes and Schemes
Microsoft allows individual users to change the color scheme of its standard Windows products and personalize the desktop with a color and image of his or her choice.
Figure 3: A screenshot of my PC desktop personalized with a picture from my vacation in Spain last year.
Personalizing the desktop with an image is a fairly easy process (a right click directly on an image in a HTML page allows you to "save as wallpaper" directly from the context menu). Since the desktop surface is a place where little interaction occurs, it is a safe area to allow users a little elbow room to individualize their work environment. The GUI of the software itself, however, is a much riskier place to let users and their creativity loose. User interface designers spend an enormous amount of time and effort to ensure that the OS interface is usable. Colors and imagery are an integral part of this usability and, therefore, end user personalization is very much restricted. Microsoft allows users to change the visual design of the OS by offering users a selection of predefined schemes to choose from. These schemes change the font size and colors of the GUI controls and other Window elements. Users are not, however, given free reign to modify the colors arbitrarily. Some of these predefined schemes are specially designed to support users with impaired vision. Another reason changes in this area are limited is so that the software manufacturer can maintain the branding integrity of its product. Macintosh, incidentally, has become even more covetous of its brand integrity and no longer allows users to apply predefined schemes to its interface.
A Personalization SurveyIn order to get an idea of what users in a business context do with the standard software installed on their computers, I conducted a short, informal survey around my office. I asked 25 software designers, writers, translators, managers and secretaries on my wing of the building what they do to personalize the visual appearance of their standard Microsoft Office software. Of those questioned, 12 had added their own background image to or changed the color of the desktop. Five had installed a "Hotbar" to jazz up the appearance of the MS Explorer browser frame and buttons. (Of those five, three are secretaries who share an office.) None had changed the standard Windows blue and gray scheme to a different predefined color scheme.
Figure 4: The results of my personalization survey What conclusions can be drawn from such an unscientific exercise? My personal conclusions are that people tend to personalize their electronic environment when it's easy and fun (or when their colleagues discover something fun and show them how to do it) and when it doesn't interfere with their work. Those things apparently apply more to personalizing the desktop than they do to changing the color scheme of the Microsoft Office products. I presume, also, that people who use their computers mostly for amusement are more interested in "playing around" with the personalization options than busy employees of large software companies. |
Custom GUIs – a Discovery of Shells and Skins
I did some surfing on the subject of software customization and personalization. I found that there is a community of developers who amuse themselves by creating software and operating system shells and skins. Most of these developers concentrate on creating skins for smaller, "leisure" software applications with a limited number of GUI controls. These applications (as opposed to applications which most people use for work, such as Microsoft Office or SAP software) are very popular targets for skinners.
Figure 5: A third party Winamp skin devised to promote the Powerade Website (www.getupstayup.com) by Franfab Denmark (image downloaded from www.winamp.com)
Many of these leisure applications, such as the Winamp audio player, offer a variety of skins from which users can choose and are included in the standard installation process. Additionally, independent third parties develop skins skins and make them available for free download from a variety of Websites. There is no guarantee, however, that third party skins will be usable and won't crash the application. Skins for very targeted applications such as media players are popular because the scope of the controls and the application is very narrow and even if the skin isn't entirely usable, most users manage when there are only a few interaction possibilities. Modifying the visual design of an entire operating system shell, however, is a much more specialized endeavor and one that is much less widespread than skinning isolated applications (media players, browsers, etc.). I've seen lots of skinned Winamps around the office, but I have never seen anyone with a custom Windows shell. The reasons for this are varied. Custom OS shells are more difficult to program, they are complicated for average users to install, they are not supported by OS manufacturers, and they are generally not as usable as the default shell design. The shear number of applications that use the operating system controls also makes third party shelling a tricky business. In skin and shell chat forums, users most often praise third party designs for their coolness and criticize them for their lack of usability.
Business Software Running in a Web Environment
Given all the difficulties involved in changing the default GUI, one might naturally ask if it makes sense to change the visual design of professional software. The answer is yes. Companies are increasingly relying on business software to generate parts of their Websites and intranets, supplying value-added access and information to employees, customers and partners by linking their entire back-end system to a Web interface available from any computer connected to the Internet. For this reason, the front-end must reflect the branding of the company whose data is being interacted with. All this is happening increasing over the Internet and within corporate intranets; for this reason, the visual design of software running in a Web environment must respond accordingly.
The trend toward rebranding business software will require that corporate Web designers learn more about traditional software UI design and that software UI designers learn more about Web design. Good software for Internet applications will be measured partly on how well it supports designers faced with the challenge of branding the software to meet their company's needs.
Getting Back to the Original Question
Have expectations of software branding and visual design also changed? I think that the answer is yes, but mostly in subtle ways and sometimes in ways that people themselves don't even realize. There is a certain comfort level that most computer users have with the visual branding of the operating system they work on, whether that be Microsoft, Macintosh, Unix or some other OS. On the other hand, the more people use electronic interfaces, the greater the temptation to play around with them is. My feeling is that more and more traditional software manufacturers will aspire to wrap their products in their own branding (as the operating system manufacturers have been doing for many years without anyone taking much notice), and that users will respond positively to that effort as long as the visual design is usable. On the other hand, as the borders between software and Websites become ever more blurry, people just want to know where they are in cyberspace, feel at home while they are there, and finish their task quickly. Software that supports business processes will have to meet increasing customer requirements to imbue the interface with their own branding. Companies will want their own branding on the front-end of software that stores, administers, and reports on their data. That's not creating bells and whistles; that's supporting reasonable customer expectations.
