Companies develop brand equity, or how users see a brand based on its name, through various outlets. Advertising, sales, and reputation play a big role.
I would argue the most important builder of brand equity lies in the user experience.
The Netflix user experience makes for many happy customers, both on and offline. Their web site offers a simple, well-designed, and pain-free experience for browsing, organizing, and watching movies. You can watch, browse, add to your queue, and make adjustments to your account. That’s about it. That’s a strong user experience.
On the flip side is The Daily, the world’s first subscription-based daily news source built specifically for Apple’s iPad. During The Daily’s free trial period, millions of users downloaded the app hoping for a revolutionary experience. What they found was more “breaking” than groundbreaking. Painfully slow download times, clunky navigation, and unexpected app failures created a poor user experience. Because of this, The Daily is struggling to fix their user experience to save any hope of success.
When developing strategy, site architecture, or web sites, I always try to think about the user experience. At HB, we recently partnered with OTE Corporation to launch a site that needed to provide clean, visuals and messages to its audiences. By placing focus on the user experience, we hope to engage customers as simply and efficiently as possible.