Last week it was announced that Amazon has purchased the hot e-commerce up-and-comer Zappos. Among the many things I found interesting about this announcement was how I didn’t associate any kind of logo or visual identity with either company. The brand that defines these online companies are not the visuals that the typical interactive design firm spends so much time developing. The brand for these web companies is the interface and user experience.
The idea of brand-as-interface is not new. Craigslist and Google are extremely well know, and incredibly recognized brands. But as many have pointed out, they have “less than pleasing” designs (aka butt ugly) with little visual identify. Their strong brand identity is defined not by colors or creative visual treatment, but rather through the functionality and simple, predictable user interface.
Brand as interface and brand experience as user experience is particularly applicable to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and web applications. The online experience is the brand. SaaS companies will bet more bang for the buck by innovating the the level of user experience then noodling excessively over the color scheme or logo design. Unlike traditional media - the words, the colors, and the graphics are important important only so much as they facilitate and amplify the user interface,
Thinking of brand as interface has another significant advantage. It is much harder to copy or supplant a good user interface, then it is to copy an aesthetic design. Yahoo has faced this repeatedly with Google. Their site, might look better graphically and have more features, but it has done little to provide a better user interface or identified high value scenarios to provide a more engaging user experience. Consequently it has not supplanted the original.
To be sure, graphical treatment and visual design are important for SaaS and web applications. But they should always be looked at in the context of how they enhance the user interface. That is the real brand and the thing you want people to remember.