Roundarch had an intranet years ago called Keystone, which evidently, was very slow, unappreciated and under-utilized. I, of course, didn’t experience any of this because I’m kind of new here – a lot of us are. We’re growing. And as the company grows so do our internal knowledge/client management needs. Enter the rebirth of Keystone, our confluence-based intranet.

Like most brand refreshes, we needed a clean slate to convey what keystone is all about: a new brand touch-point to ignite excitement. The challenge here was to create something a little out of the ordinary yet something that embodied what keystone is (part intranet, part wiki, part client presentation tool). The difficulty is that keystone is ever-changing, it’s never the same twice. Content is constantly in a state of flux. So are the users. So we set out to reinforce and promote innovation and creative thinking by thinking a little differently about what the logo should be.

It’s difficult to design the shapes and lines of a logo to visually represent something so ethereal as a digital space for sharing/mixing/provoking work/viewpoints/ideas, so we designed the logo to offer the user a glimpse into the inner workings of keystone. The logo mark itself is a visualization of the real-time activity taking place in each of Roundarch’s Communities of Practice. After all, a wiki without activity or an intranet without files doesn’t have a shape and therefore isn’t alive. But by giving form to these parameters floating in the ether, we were able to ground these concepts in something solid – the logo. Each triangle changes size and shape based on certain input parameters being returned to it from the confluence database. It’s not interactive, but reactive.

By choosing a color palette that is vibrant and on-brand, and assigning a color to each of Roundarch’s Communities of Practice, we developed a system whereby, at a glance, a user can see how active each of keystone’s pillars really are – and by extension – can judge keystone’s overall health by looking at the size, shape and placement of each of the triangles. The logo mark doesn’t just tell the story of health, it’s a visual representation of the mixing and converging of diverse opinions and views. By sharing a common boundary, each shape and each color tells their own story while being self-referential and self-reinforcing – like a round arch.

In June, I had the chance to speak at the annual meeting of the Usability Professionals’ Association in Baltimore. The topic was “The Brand vs. Usability Face-off.”

The premise of the presentation was that as companies extend their brands to the Web, they want to leverage brand elements that help make them successful in the offline world—and rightly so. But when we attempt to force traditional brand elements onto the structure, navigation, and function of a website, the user experience may suffer.

Conversely, brand can take a backseat to usability issues, and become diluted or even ignored.

Some of the tough questions that site owners have to tackle are:

·  Which traditional brand elements translate to the Web, and which do not?

·  Can a brand architecture work as an information architecture?

·  How do established brand elements and business practices need to adapt to work in this medium?

·  How do we distinguish ourselves from our competitors, even if we’re all trying to accomplish essentially the same thing online?

 The good news is that a site’s user experience design can be used strategically to enforce the brand—not just sit alongside it. Through the use of real-world examples (successful and not) my highly visual presentation looked at how companies can best communicate brand to the online audience.

The presentation was well-received by an audience of about 100 conference attendees. Included in that audience was Steve Krug, author of the landmark user experience book Don’t Make Me Think. Mr. Krug was even kind enough to come up after the presentation and offer some kind words.

Next up on my “world tour” will be a workshop on “Rich UX Documentation” at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York (www.web2expo.com).