Interaction Brand Language

2004-2005
My goal was to create an interaction brand language enabling a consistent user experience across all product categories. While managing the larger North American Usability team, I defined, evangelized, and led this project.

GOALS:

  • Create consistent user interfaces and interaction experiences for users within a product, model line, category, and brand.
  • Increase consumer benefits
    • Common brand experience
    • Standardize user interface and interaction
    • Cross product generalizable learnings
    • Extensible ease of use
    • Increase sense of familiarity + control
    • Lower consumer-instruct tech support calls
    • Improve product usage and satisfaction
    • Reduce product learning curve
  • Increase Whirlpool benefits
    • Increase brand equity
    • Strengthen brand identity & recognition
    • Increase consumer loyalty
    • Increase purchased products (buy suites)
    • Reduce costs
    • Reduce design + development time
    • Improve quality

ACTIONS:

  • Sold project concept and plan to 5 division VPs
  • Secured a $2M budget and 4 person design team
  • Competitive product analysis and Whirlpool product analysis across US and Italy
  • Led team through creation of information architecture diagrams and interaction flow diagrams for key products across each product category
  • Created and used a new Usability Experience Metric (UXm) to help us assess the impact of our solutions

RESULTS:

  • UXm was highly successful
    • Enabled us to easily compare products within a platform, across platforms, & across categories
    • Compared usability within or across categories, against competition,  against brand / biz needs
  • Created new methods, tools, and the beginning of an interaction brand language
  • Information architectures helped…
    • Consistency within and across categories, structures / organization schemes, vocabularies (e.g., “keep warm” vs “warm hold”)
    • Predict UI needs
    • Plan and compare features across brands and model lines
    • Design to accommodate future features
  • Interaction models helped…
    • Product behavior was designed, not just engineered
    • Consistent interaction schemes
    • Re-usable architectures (refine don’t re-invent)
    • Interaction modules created consistency
    • Detailed interaction design specifications reduced engineering development time
    • Identified opportunities for innovation
  • Generally, moved closer toward 1 brand, 1 suite, 1 UI technology, with 1 UI look, feel, & architecture
  • Overall intended major impact was missing as our larger company goals were not adopted by each division