Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Sarah Daull

Pixels have been shaping our experience and the way we interact with digital products for decades, and it is through an interface (the famous UI) that we get the sense of the brand that stands behind the screen.

The ascendancy of the mobile phone, and mobile apps in particular, presents new challenges for brands. Maintaining a brand identity across channels, and replicating an experience from store to web to app can be a tough nut to crack, whether you’re a designer, a developer, or a marketing professional.

Things moves fast in the mobile world, and so consistency and design aesthetic are essential consideration to anyone trying to create successful app experiences. Here are 3 guiding principles that will help you achieve brand harmony in your app and beyond:

Consistency reigns supreme

Consistency is a valuable design principle and an essential element of any successful brand, digital and otherwise. Designing with consistency and aligning all the digital assets with the brand has numerous benefits: not only it saves a lot of time and money for the company, but it considerably improves users experience with the product.

Consistent brand guidelines allow your team to spend less time talking about what the design should be, and instead focus on building the whole experience. On the user’s side, consistency is the basis for what feels natural and familiar, creating an experience that feels intuitive.

A good example of this can be seen in AirBNB, where you could start browsing on the web for apartments for your next vacation, and complete the booking in the app on the go, and it would all feel like a part of the same experience. AirBNB design head Alex Schleifer explained: “we’re trying to rethink the experience of Airbnb, as if it started in the mobile era”.

Make it beautiful

Consistency does not mean you have to be boring or that you’ll be copying and pasting the same button over and over again. On the contrary, keeping the design familiar while differentiating and building a product that is also fun and delightful requires a great amount of creativity.

First impression counts, a lot. So does design aesthetic. In fact “beautiful” designs are perceived as more usable than “unaesthetic” ones, even if that’s not the case. That’s because visually appealing design satisfies our senses and give us pleasure. Because users expectations have skyrocketed, it’s no longer enough to just make a usable app, you must trigger good emotion and provide a positive user experience.

In traditional industries like finance, the design of a mobile app can be the one variable that makes a brand stand out. Robinhood is a mobile trading app with minimalist design that aligns with its mission of making simplicity an adjective for mobile stock trading. Their intuitive functionality and vivid colors conveys this feeling of “wow” user experience.

Think Design system

Color palette, font, imagery, layout, and spacing — to name just a few — are the building blocks of visual aesthetics. And brand style guidelines give clear directions on how those elements should be applied and reflect the brand across digital assets. But the design language of a brand does not stop there, and it is important to see it as a living system that evolves with users needs, corporate goals or design trends.

Ultimately, the vision behind a design system is about giving a tool for designers AND developers to build a consistent user experience through a common language. A tool that provides ready-made reusable elements and components designers can use to build better and faster scalable products, and a language that allows small or global teams to collaborate.

The article was originally published on Insert’s blog and corrected by Hila Miller.

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3 Commandments of Mobile Brand Harmony was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

3 Commandments of Mobile Brand Harmony

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