Kristian Andersen - Brand Experience Design
Kristian Andersen is the founder of Kristian Andersen + Associates, a "multi-disciplinary brand and experience design consultancy". He spoke this afternoon to about 30 students at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing in Bloomington, IN. I want to thank Jeremy Podany, the Career Services Director for the School, for inviting Kristian. It was an extremely informational session and great to hear from someone who is on the front lines every day.
One of the first things you will notice about Kristian and his firm is that they craft compelling brands and user experiences - or as he calls it, "Brand Experience Design". He quoted Jim Wicks, Motorola VP of Consumer Experience Design, who says "The product is the brand. You build brand in our industry through the product and the experience." As Kristian put it, the interface is the product is the brand is the experience is the interface.
With this mindset, he clarified that this means we create environments that allow experiences to take place for the client/customer/user. When most people consider who designs experience, there is the usual list of suspects such as user experience designers, interaction designers, graphic designers and maybe even developers but we tend to give lip-service when it comes to the role sales, support and even users have in being a crucial part of designing experience. To further elaborate on this, Kristian stated that UX is less of a discipline and more of a philosophy. The customer's perception of a brand is driven by the experience manifest in all customer touch points which can be represented by retail, sales, product, utilization, and support. In other words, the user experience is about whole systems and their interconnections. Thus, the business of UX - IS business. UX is foundational to the crafting of business models. Value proposition is the reason customers turn to one company over another. It solves customers problems or satisfies a customer need. UX helps discover, define, design, and deliver this.Bringing this back to the top level, Kristian stated that you are famous for what you do - it defines you for the future. It is important to pick and choose who you will work for and what you are willing to do. To further promote the importance of Kristian's design philosophy, he emphasized that UX transcends software. Experience needs to be recognized as a service - 60-70% of the GDP of developed countries is derived from services. Experience transcends digital artifacts. Thus, UX must account for both the product and the service element. We cannot forget that services have interfaces and someone has to design them. Apple recognized the importance of this early on.Kristian then shared how this philosophy has been manifest in his firm by sharing some work samples with their clients. Graphite is a weight loss and energy tracking website. When Kristian's firm started working with them, they ended up re-naming and re-positioning the company. The focus was shifted to an often overlooked market in this industry - men. In addition as part of the total brand user experience the had the founder write a book about his experience. [sidenote: there is an article on Mashable about this website. Here is what they had to say: "What we like about Graphite is that the interface is very, very clean and easy to use."]
Another project was for Bigger Africa, the largest social networking website in Africa. When asked "why do you want to build a social network?" it turns out their focus was on entrepreneurs. The site is now sponsored by US corporations to appeal to talent in Africa and it re-oriented the way they went about their mission.Another very exciting project was ExactTarget Carbon, where they completely rethought how they were tracking results and activity. KA+A was instructed to think in terms of "what should we be doing in five years?" In a large part the project was all about indoctrinating the whole staff about design thinking. Kristian stated that "great designers are great sales people". He talked about how design firms such as IDEO, Adaptive Path, and Frog are all good at knowledge transfer - teaching people to know and understand how they think and value what they do. He gave a great example of how designers could learn from celebrity chefs. They have figured out how to give away what they know (cookbooks and tv shows). This in turn drives utilization of their restaurants and products. Of course, these chefs have their act together in the kitchen as well as in the dining room - where the product is presented. I asked Kristian how he got to the point where his firm blended both brand strategy with experience design. He talked about how it was predominantly fueled by startups that have been happening in Indy for the past 7-8 years. About three years ago, his firm got to the level where they felt they needed to start focusing on fewer things. Before that they were providing a lot of different services. When prospective clients asked him what they did, he started out by talking about all of the things that they don't do. Throughout this process, two things had to always be there - brand strategy and UX. About 90% of their clients were software companies and medical/technical firms. He said that they wanted to make what they do worthy of study by academics and payment by CEO's. I thought that was a great perspective on clarifying their purpose. Kristian said that it is not always easy to articulate his business because it is subjective, intuitive, and based upon taste and preference. The way he was describing it made me think of the craftsmanship model that Eisner talks about. Kristian also talked about the necessity to show the empirical evidence of the value of this brand experience design model. He referred to the UK Design Council study which identified the value of publicly traded companies based upon the importance of design within their culture. This study roughly indicated that organizations that placed a high value on design had a substantially higher overall value. Another student asked Kristian about the process his firm uses with a client. A few of the pertinent points were that they conduct generative qualitative research and use that to lead them to secondary research for quantitative validation. When they are conducting interviews for research they do it over dinner, not in some lab environment somewhere. When they enter into the insight stage they start at the feature level, using affinity diagramming as well as generating with problem framing. KA+A doesn't deliver a bunch of paper documentation. They typically skip wireframing altogether, going to fully functional prototypes. He stated that documentation and wireframing is used to keep people from getting in trouble by using it as a safety net to validate that everything was done "properly". In spite of the length of this blog post, this is a rough overview of what Kristian talked about. I know that I have not given justice to the depth and breadth of the material Kristian shared with us. I encourage you to add your thoughts and insights to this topic by posting your comments below.
