The Solburst Score
Experience design dictates how we spend all of our time and money. The design elements we encounter day to day shape our experiences, and our experiences eventually form brands. But even though brands infiltrate our schedules and power our purchases, the omnipresent omnipotence of experience design often goes unnoticed.
So what is experience design? And what is a brand?
Experience design is a practice that draws from many other disciplines to create memorable moments of engagement. These moments combine over months and years to help us make emotional associations about a company, product, or place.
A brand is the set of associations that we make about a company, product, or place. These associations leave literal impressions on our minds that stay with us between moments of engagement.
In sum, experiences produce brands. An organization’s brand is based on how it designs internal and external experiences: hiring and firing employees, collecting customer insights, developing product opportunities, and presenting sensory details.
I have always been obsessed with well-designed experiences, and how such experiences give rise to the world’s most powerful brands. After ditching a legal career for one in design, I realized that most organizations fail to measure their most important metric: experience. So for the past year, I focused on creating an equation that would do just that!
I created the Solburst Score (explained below) to serve as the basis of my insights still to come. The Score helps me navigate my own work and analyze the work of others. It shines a brighter light on the importance of experience design and assigns weight to intangible brand experiences. Like all creative work, great experiences exude a simplicity that belies their sophistication. The more effortless an experience seems, the more effort a designer invested to make it seem that way. My hope is that the work and analysis I share through Solburst will enhance your understanding and appreciation of experience design, and how it creates the brands that rule our lives.
The Solburst Score identifies and evaluates the design elements of a brand experience using the Experience Equation laid out below. Nine variables are grouped into three sections--emergence, engagement, and emotion. The Equation averages the totals for each section to reach the final Solburst Score.
The Solburst Score does not calculate brand performance in terms of growth, pricing, profitability, clicks, or market share. The Score indicates the strengths and weaknesses of a customer’s experience with a company’s design, independent of the company’s size and revenue. Because a brand is a distinct feeling about a company, product, or place, true brand differences cannot be measured like units and clicks, but rather, as they exist in the minds of people. The purpose of the Solburst Score is to measure brand equity in the most accurate way possible, providing a quantitative method of capturing intangible assets that can be used alongside the conventional metrics that currently dominate brand strategy.
Those working in brand management today might argue that the hard data they measure means more than nebulous qualitative notions. However, their numerical perspective fails to recognize that data only measures brief, blurry snapshots in time, leaving the bulk of all human behavior and emotion unobserved. Still, some may roll their eyes and refuse to take seriously a score that relies on intuition and inspiration. I welcome the criticism and leave the critics to their calculators and spreadsheets where they will measure markets but never invent one. Instinct and creativity will always precede the numbers and evade the measurements.
So without further ado, I present:
EMERGENCE
Experience design starts when a product first emerges, or comes into view. We’re advised not to judge a book by its cover, but when it comes to design experiences, our brains can’t help it! First impressions matter. Visual introductions impact how we feel about a product and whether or not we consider engaging with it. So what do our brains notice? The sequence of cognition, or the order in which our brains pick up on certain design variables, is as follows:
A. Contour: When a product comes into view, our brains first notice contour, or shape.
Differentiation: How does the shape of the product compare to the competing shapes around it on a shelf?
Thoughtfulness: Is the shape of the product designed for human use, or does it have any bearing on the health of the planet?
Organization: How does the organization of the icons or words on the product compare to others and orient our attention?
Outer shape of a product is pivotal, but so is the shape of the content on the product. When the shape of a product, it’s packaging, its icons and its words seem to fit and flow, our brains receive signals to keep looking.
B. Color: When a product comes into view, the second thing our brains notice is color.
Context: How do the conditions affect the way we experience the chosen color(s)?
Contrast: Does the design master the use of contrast through color?
Meaning: Do we find the tonal value of the colors appropriate for the suggested product use? How do they make us feel?
Color speaks a language of its own. Contrast is critical, and context plays a huge role in the message a color might send. Overall, our brains respond emotionally and react subconsciously to color, forming our decisions in ways we may not be aware of in the moment. In other words, colors speak louder than words.
C. Content: When a product comes into view, the third thing our brains notice is content.
Clarity: Is the content easy to pronounce and does it quickly communicate a company’s vision?
Cleverness: Is the content (name, slogan, etc.) creative and memorable?
Compulsion: Does the content convey passion that compels us to buy?
Content can be a company’s greatest asset and provide convenient ways for us to make the associations needed to remember a brand and become its advocate. The accessibility, wit, and power behind words strengthen the emotions felt from contour and color and are necessary to build deep brand connections.
Summary: When a product emerges, cohesion among contour, color, and content is crucial. A designer’s goal is to create an experience that looks and feels distinctive, and is immediately recognizable. If a designer covers up an icon or logo on a product, we should be able to identify the brand based on the remaining design elements.
ENGAGEMENT
After a product emerges, it must re-emerge continuously to keep our attention. To avoid confusion, re-emergence efforts are referred to in this document as engagement. Companies must figure out how to engage with their customers regularly to gain loyalty. After a product emerges in a store or online, there are many different ways to interact with a customer. New, timely, and creative experiences are needed again and again to build a strong and long-lasting brand connection.
A. Utility: Strong design experiences will be available all the time.
Time: Does the company choose the right time and cadence to introduce another touchpoint?
Place: Is the engagement shared through the appropriate channels?
Quality: Does the engagement meet or exceed the expectations set during the emergence experience?
There is a difference between utility and ubiquity. Design must be executed with careful thought about time, place, and quality. Designers that use visuals without regard for harmony with the environment will dilute a brand’s identity, even if that brand appears to be everywhere. The intention should be to involve design in a way that makes a brand presence intelligible and considerate, creating communications that customers want without violating their personal space. Design assets should flow with who and what surround them.
B. Understanding: Strong design experiences build and maintain great rapport.
Intuition: Does the engagement uncover the deep subconscious values we are looking for in the market?
Empathy: Does the engagement embody the human challenges we face now, and those to come?
Solution: Does the engagement make the brand a go-to solution for a problem?
There is nothing more intimate than being understood. The most brilliant brands make us feel known and appreciated on some of the deepest levels. Through understanding, brands create tribes and become rulers over a particular need, activity, mood, or situation that we can’t imagine our lives without.
C. Unity: Strong design experiences connect people.
Diversity: Does the engagement build a tribe of diverse people based on shared values or passions?
Sentience: Does the engagement prove that the brand is aware and responsive to trending or troubling issues?
Simplicity: Does the engagement provide natural and simple ways for us to connect with one another?
A brand that wants to stand out has little choice but to serve as a unifying voice. Courageous and compelling brand engagement brings people from all walks of life together by being aware of the issues in the world that matter most. As design has grown in importance over time, our social identities have become increasingly wrapped up in the brands our experiences develop.
Summary: After emergence, a brand must continue to re-emerge and engage customers in quality experiences. A brand’s utility, empathy, and ability to unite diverse peoples are essential in keeping the brand magic alive. If done thoughtfully, consistently, and outside traditional marketing channels, we will perceive brands as extensions of ourselves, in line with how we currently identify and who we aspire to be. Despite our many differences around the world, we are all attracted to brands that connect us with people we would otherwise never have considered. Great experience design moves and improves us when nothing else can.
EMOTION
Emotion is the glue that keeps a design experience together. Good experience design will capture emotion when it first emerges and cultivate emotion through frequent re-emergence, or engagements. The goal is to stimulate the senses in memorable and timeless ways. Providing feelings is more important than providing information because we are information rich and time poor. Products that elicit strong emotional connections become constant topics of internal thought and external conversation, which leads us to make choices that go beyond convenience or price.
A. Rousing: Great experience design immediately gives rise to emotions.
Psychology: Does the experience design correspond to our emotions and capabilities?
Authenticity: Does the experience design appeal to emotion through genuine and consistent interest?
Magic: Is the design experience more attractive than the product/service offered?
Whether first emerging, or re-emerging, a product that gives rise to emotions will create an indelible experience. In order to give rise to emotions, designers have to understand human behavior and the value of authenticity to generate brand magic.
B. Reliable: Great experience design wins trust.
Transparency: Is the experience design vulnerable and open about company practices and culture?
Action: Does the experience design communicate values and prove that the company keeps promises?
Commitment: Is the experience design representative of the company’s dedication to customer service?
Relationships, whether with people or with brands, are about trust. Trust is earned through clarity and consistency, when actions meet words. Sincere customer service and dependable design creates trust. If we have to play detective or question quality, it only takes a second for us to move on to a better brand.
C. Resonant: Great experience design fits effortlessly into our complex lives.
Archetype: Has the experience design aligned itself with a particular theme to appeal to our ego, emotional state, need, or aspiration?
Optimism: Does the experience design acknowledge and respect human struggles, and inspire hope?
Courage: Does the experience design focus on the big picture and push boundaries?
Experiences that identify with common life themes, optimism, and courage develop relevance in the marketplace. People want brands that are closely connected with humanity. Generating and maintaining relevance requires imagination, and can even lead to something revolutionary.
Summary: Products that reveal an emotional soul elicit emotional responses. Provoking our emotions allows for customer-brand bonding. Appealing to emotion is more powerful than appealing to rational thought or measured consideration because it is the only way to align the head, heart and gut. Emotions provide reassurance and a desire to be socially responsible. They quench a thirst for visceral engagement. With more mediums than ever before, brand identities can become splintered in their offerings because physical and digital strategies do not deliver a consistent voice. Brand narratives need to be consistent and rich in their exploration of new ways to stimulate people’s emotions. Effective design is about energizing our hearts and minds through experience.
Conclusion
When a product first emerges, its contour, color, and content create an experience. That experience forms the face of a brand and introduces the true nature of a company. Corporate culture, commitment, and creativity are led by a visual language and supported by an imaginative experience. Every design decision shines through at the point of emergence.
After a product emerges, moments of engagement should be useful, understanding, and unifying in order to reveal a brand’s fundamental promise: our current experience will meet or exceed our last. While designers try to reveal the meaning of an experience at first sight, they also make sure to provide exponential interpretations that help us return for both familiar comfort and new excitement. Providing different interpretations of an experience’s meaning allows us to connect with a brand based on our existing emotional states. Rather than the static snapshot of an emergent episode, brand engagements are dynamic and continuous.
Emotion binds our first design experience with all the engagements we encounter thereafter. Our feelings about design create brands, and brands are met with loyalty, indifference, or abhorrence. Without emotion, a brand does not exist. Wherever the brand rests in our minds, emotion is what puts it there, keeps it there, and lights it up when there is a need or craving. Emotion ultimately informs our reason, and is the ethereal, but very real, material of a brand.
Experience design cannot be bought, or prescribed through market research. The best designers know that customers’ preferences are both moving targets and eternal truths. At a time when businesses are easier to start and industries are more crowded than ever, design that masters the elements of emergence, engagement and emotion will produce experience that rise above the clutter.