Murphy’s Hypotenuse—The Unmistakable Power of Icons (Part Two)

By Patrick Murphy

 In Wednesday's edition of Murphy’s Hypotenuse, we explored my love for icons, as well as how Canon makes nimble use of a virtual icon flood to effectively demonstrate product attributes in digital cameras.

 Now, we’ll take a look at a couple of different impactful ways that icons drive the world of products and services.

The second reason for increased icon prevalence is that they contribute heavily to the customer experience. They’re optimized ergonomics for our frazzled consumer brains. Today’s product and service markets are complex and saturated  with vast options and an incessant flow of information, and trying to make decisions based on that multitude of information available can be an arduous process. Any time this information can be simplified or summarized, as with icons, it’s an opportunity for a better experience for the customer.

There are quite a few examples of good and bad information delivery with or without icons, but I’ll focus on one to get my point across. Time Warner Cable offers TV, internet, and phone services. The services they offer have gradually shifted, in consumer minds over time, from luxuries (the 80s) to commodities (now), and they are now taken for granted so much that actually shopping for them is seen more as a hassle by many people than an enjoyable experience. Add to that consumer perceptions of TWC being a monopolized utility concern, and you have a couple of ingredients for a platform of diabolical consumer experience.

However, Time Warner has mitigated some of this perceived awfulness through the use of icons:

TWC’s main product page offers this banner of four simple icons, the first three representing their different services, and the fourth a clear combination of the first three describing the ability to “bundle” them. Unlike some tech service companies that flood their websites with so much information that it’s difficult to grasp exactly what it is they’re selling, they’ve stripped down and iconified their entire breadth of offerings into a simple set of graphics. These icons don’t remove the chore-like element of subscribing to these services, but the intuitive and clutter-free interface at least infers some element of ease in the process at the very beginning of the purchasing experience.

Now for the not-so-practical truth about icons—they simply have a cool factor you can’t get in any other design vehicle. A good icon has swagger, and it’s a bold statement of confidence and character. It’s a brand planting its flag with pride on its merchandise.  

Icons draw a buyer in, much in the same way tattoos draw your eyes on people on the street day to day. Due to its simplified nature you may not even understand it the second you lay eyes on it - but when you get it, it burns into your retina and delivers its message. Some of the best logos feature icons – especially newer, emerging companies who cannot be recognized by simply their name or centuries-old trademark

Icons are the little guys in the design world that pack a great punch in so many ways, telling brand stories, making bold statements to define customer experience, and alerting buyers to important features, benefits, technology, and applications that drive the purchasing process in a powerful fashion.

Deep Dive into Process Mapping—Customer Interaction Maps

Customer interaction maps are great tools for managing the brand experience with a holistic approach.  These maps combine different elements of the experience—from advertising and packaging to using a product.  This empathetic approach to following each of the customer’s interactions with the brand can be used to identify short-comings in the overall experience and guide the brand management team to make intelligent refinements, or even radical changes to build the brand’s marketplace equity.

The key to effective customer interaction mapping is not only spending lots of time talking to customers, but asking honest questions about what you can do to improve the customer’s experience.  A great starting point is to envision each possible touch-point where a customer intersects physically with the product or virtually with a brand expression, such as a carefully placed magazine advertisement.  Let’s take a look at a generic process map that would be applicable to most products in marketplace.



During the process of refining the interaction map, it is important to keep the elements fluid to quickly adapt to new insights by keeping the map on a whiteboard or sketched on large sheets of paper.  While at first glance, a customer interaction map can seem a bit chaotic, it does separate into five basic steps around the event of purchasing a product:  pre-purchase, trigger point, intentional shopping, purchase, and post-purchase.  A key observation of the pre-purchase step is that some points of interaction are customer-initiated, such as social media conversations about a company and its products, while in others the company initiates the interaction, such as product advertising while the potential customer is watching television.  Brand and product management teams must convey a consistent experience across these and other channels of interaction to ensure that one experience with the brand at a neglected website, doesn’t betray an outstanding retail display.

The trigger point is an event that happens for the customer where they realize the need for purchasing a product that may be independent of company actions.  Possible trigger points could be their existing product breaks down, needs an upgrade, a problem occurs that needs a new solution, or directly responding to the product ad itself because the new product has the ‘gotta-have-it’ factor.  Up until the trigger point, all of the advertising and messaging has gone into memory, to be recalled as the initial consideration set.  In the pre-internet days, that consideration set was a closed loop with few additional entrants.  Today, the availability of information can introduce many more products for consideration, making the intentional shopping period between the customer’s trigger point and actual purchase that much more important.

When customers are in the intentional shopping phase, each interaction is critical to winning their business.  Customers may follow a dual path of digital and retail shopping, either of which could result in a purchase outcome, but the total interaction experience needs to consider both paths.   As you interview and observe customers about their experiences at this phase, particular attention should be paid to opportunities for improvement and engagement that could make a competitive difference for your brand.  If potential purchasers have their feelings and preliminary findings confirmed by the purchasing experience, the more likely they will complete the transaction and set a course for enjoying the product.

Finally, the customer interactions during the period after purchase, defined as touch-points like product delivery, ease of assembly or installation, and ease of use will determine whether a product is returned, kept begrudgingly, or, in the best case, creates a fan of the brand. When customers feel like they’ve been well-guided in their first experience with a product that they spent some time, effort, and money to invest in making their lives better, that spark of brand loyalty can be sustained for the long term, creating resonance for repeat purchases.

Authentic Brands Have Great User Manuals

By Ty Hagler

As the saying goes, “Don’t ruin a $100 meal with a five cent dessert.” The same can be said for building great brands, and the required attention to detail in order to make sure that every expression of the brand – from product to website, packaging to retail environments – communicates a consistent, authentic message. 

Brands signal quality across a series of products, and a negative sign of quality in one product has the ability to influence customer perception of the entire brand. Take, for instance, Toyota’s problems with the Prius a few years back (and the company’s initial response, perceived by some to be tone-deaf), and their impact on sales across the entire Toyota line. Consumers are willing to forgive the occasional mistakes of established brands like Toyota.  Emerging brands are more vulnerable to poorly executed brand expressions, since consumers are still in an evaluation phase with regard to their respective opinions and personal experiences with the brand.

In order to drive brand engagement and equity, companies must try to hit on all cylinders with regard to the brand experience. This means that companies must pay attention to every detail—from the product’s design, in terms of form and function, the packaging (which drives the purchasing experience), logos and brand marks, and the overall experience of customers in each purchasing channel, be it a retail store or an e-commerce site.

One aspect of the brand experience that companies neglect, and often to their peril, is the user manual. While the user manual for most products isn’t a key selling-point that would influence the purchase, it is an essential part of proving the value of the purchase – and ultimately influences the consumer’s perception of that brand’s quality. The user manual, particularly for advanced technology products, is critical to the total brand experience. Often, these products are introducing innovation in function which necessitates creating a new customer experience, to which the customer is asked to learn something new to get the benefit of the increased functionality.

A word of caution: while user manuals are critical to delivering an authentic brand experience, they should not be used as a patch for ill-conceived customer experiences.  The most elegant manual simply can’t make up for needlessly complex products that have been overburdened by features during their development. In these cases, the user manual grows in complexity, becoming intimidating and useless to the consumer.  The good news is that, if the product design team has done their job to deliver a clean user experience, then the user manual should be a simple matter of communicating their success.

Too often, user manuals rely upon 3D CAD screenshots and language only an engineer‘s mother could love. It’s absolutely critical that brand managers understand that user manuals can transcend this template. Thoughtful illustrations of the steps involved in assembly or use of the product, along with clear, concise instructions, go a long way to making the customer comfortable as she experiences a product for the first time. The written instructions should exemplify the language of the product’s customer base itself.

Finally, once a company has a “draft” of the user manual in place, another critical step of market research, one-on-one customer testing, should take place. Potential customers should vet the efficacy of the user manual—customers unburdened by the knowledge of all of the assumptions made by designers and engineers during the development of the product. This un-biased feedback ensures that the product developers aren’t blinded by their own expertise, but guided by empathy for people they want to purchase and enjoy their products, thus building a successful brand.

Design Thinking for Cost Leadership

Debate Each Nickel (or Each Minute!)through the Lens of Your Customer

Design Thinking is the customer-centered creative process for consistent innovation. In a cost leadership strategy, the focus is not on traditional design problems of form or function, but rather to deliver the lowest retail price at the highest margin with acceptable product quality. Surprisingly, the design thought process has a lot to say about what customers find acceptable within this framework.

One case in the Trig Innovation portfolio comes to mind. We developed a product for a company in the kitchen cabinet industry—a design that made zero changes to the aesthetics while significantly impacting the customer experience. The application of design thinking to the customer assembly process reduced assembly time by 95%, resulting in a remarkable assembly times averaging less than 2 minutes.  This resulted in an extraordinary solution that fit the client's cost leadership strategy.

At the opening price point for kitchen cabinets, we found the person making the purchase decision is usually the installer—a true do-it-yourself customer. These DIYers often used their cabinet purchases for renovations of secondary homes and rental properties. Once they have selected their cabinet of choice, these installers are minimally influenced by aesthetics. Savings—in terms of both time and money—drives these purchasers. Since they save 28 minutes of installation time on each cabinet purchased, these installers can do more jobs in a week, directly impacting their take-home pay with no added costs.  

The purchase decision for products at the opening price point is complex. Customers are willing to compromise on many aspects of a product to get the lowest price. In order to create disruptive innovation at a cost leadership position, design thinking discovers critical factors for the customer. In this case, speed of assembly was the key differentiator among similarly priced kitchen cabinets.  All in all, the result was a huge win for both manufacturer and customer.