Archive for August 25th, 2008

Approximately 24 years after Apple got it with the Macintosh and many of their other products, AdWeek surmises in an article that User Experience is a reflection on the brand, as Viaspire points out. (A manager of mine with one of those fancy MBA titles pointed this out to me in 1998, so I know it’s not some new thing, but back then, User Experience wasn’t a term until Jesse James Garrett could make money off of it).

Well, duh.

Not to further point out the obvious, but whenever a company touches a customer, it’s a reflection on the brand, whether it be through a website, a commercial, or the actual product. Phenominal User Experiences with the correct amount of Marketing bring profitability (read: Apple’s record quarter of Mac Sales, Amazon’s success as a retailer, eBay’s branding as the world’s largest garage sale).

Again, it’s not just a technology thing — the company has to live and breathe it.

It’s all a reflection of the brand.

I picked the Los Angeles Angels Network because it’s my favorite baseball team, but the authors have created a bunch of applications for all the major sports teams, and each is branded to each team. If I were to create an application that was for sports and the MySpace platform, this is it (even though it’s obviously a port from Facebook).

The sports network applications are very rich experiences that has all the information about the team, trivia questions about the team where you are ranked with other group members, and you can talk smack about other teams. The canvas surface of the application has a summary page that drives traffic into all of the other pages of the application, and it’s very dense with content even if it is a bit overwhelming.

This is an extension of the MySpace platform because it also has commenting, essentially creating not only a group for fans to meet, but also drawing in other content they can find out about the team. It’s a mini-portal, done right.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 4
• Usability: 5
• Fun Factor: 4
• Stability: 5
• Monetization Opportunities: 5