Designing for different devices without repeating yourself

When it comes to promoting your brand across multiple devices, it's easy to want to simply copy and paste one campaign and blast it out to the different audiences on each devices, but what happens when those audiences overlap? Chris Do from Blind and Skot Carruth of Philosophie explain how to design your brand and marketing campaigns for various devices at Oshyn and The Skool's Tech Mornings: Ubiquitous Design.

Video Transcript:

Chris Do, Blind: “I think with Gotham’s comment, I think there’s a different between a marketing message vs an application or a website. Where he’s responding to the cookie cutter, same image everywhere and it’s annoying him or something like that. Whereas I think from an application or a web experience, you want it to be consistent across the platforms while taking advantage of the individual platform itself. Here’s an example that I’ve experienced, I wish the designers that make the mobile app would then make the desktop app, because when you’re designing for mobile it’s really simple. They understand that you have limited dexterity and there are only so many functions that you can do. I find the Pinterest app to be better functioning as an app rather than a desktop experience because it’s easier for me to pin, group, and organize things. It makes guesses for me as to where I want to put things, and so it’s kind of anticipating my next step. So that’s all I have to say about that.”

Jose Caballer, The Skool: “That’s awesome. Context really does provide a lot.”

Skot Carruth, Philosohie: “I have two things to say, the first is that brand designers, identity design, high-level marketing positions, CMOs, maybe, have to have a broader understanding of the places where their brands may appear now and in the future. I think when you see a new form of advertising and the brand is poorly executed on it, it might be because the people who are creating the execution, the agency or the internal marketing department may be bound by certain brand guidelines that were created years ago, before the new medium came, so I think keeping your brand guidelines up-to-date and having awareness of them when you’re designing the brand could help.

The second thing is that those people involved in the execution of the marketing campaigns need to be more user experience-oriented. So a marketing campaign has a user experience, UX is not just about an app that’s interactive and can I accomplish my task. When you’re perceiving anything there’s an experience there and I think that marketing people should be thinking in the same way that interaction designers do which is: Why are they on the site? Why did we choose to add on this site in the first place? And how can we make it contextualized somehow? And those two things combined could help to create a better user experience for advertisements.

To expand on that just a tiny bit, we do have more and more data about what consumers are doing, right? There are so many cookies tracking you, you have no idea! And I think a lot of people understand this conceptually that they’re being tracked and that people know what their habits are online and what they’re doing. But the truth is, to execute on that well takes a genius. It’s really, really, really, difficult to comprehend. Say we have thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people we have all this big data on them, how do we use that to stratify user groups and then start serving up different programs for them? It’s exceptionally difficult to execute on. So I think that you have to bring it all together, have the user experience orientation but also have those really smart analytical people to change that. And it’s happening slowly because it’s so hard.”