The Level of Harmony: A Validation Strategy for Brand & User Experience

Abstract

To stay competitive, users’ needs have to be continuously addressed and holistically contemplated. Likewise, in order to create a harmonic user and brand experience, also brands’ own values have to be regarded carefully. In this work, we present a first version (work-in progress) of an evaluation strategy aimed at assessing how to validate the level of harmony between brand and user experience at the touch-point of a user interface. The goal is to support design agencies to iteratively create and justify the designs to their clients. Our hypothesis is that human values can be taken as representations of universal psychological human needs, which companies want to constitute to reach a certain audience. The assumptions is, that from the level certain psychological needs are fulfilled by using a product, it can be deriving whether or not brand values could be translated into a product by design. Initial results confirm our hypothesis and reveal insights about matches and mismatches between UX and BX.