PRODUCT DESIGN + BRAND EXPERIENCE

Today’s brands are increasingly experienced digitally. Given their presence across multiple mediums, it becomes imperative to consider these as a collective, cohesive set of behaviors, interactions and patterns. With this in mind, it becomes possible to rethink the brand as a platform, inviting new opportunities of engagement levels. It’s about bringing to fore latent relationships that fortifies a brand’s potential—an act of revealing the invisible, to evolve in becoming presently visible.

Commodities In The Experience Economy

Envisioning A New Product Experience

Design Principles

Iterative projects benefit from design principles to guide and focus its evolution.

– Be Human

– Be Tactile and Emotional

– Provide Focus

– Reward Attention, Don’t Demand It

– Learn and Calibrate

Visual Voice

Working with British Gas’ brand color scheme and referencing their iconic flame ribbon element, graphic permutations were developed to be charismatic and emotive—creating a visual voice with various inflections, tone, motion and modulations that can be applied in multiple context. It’s about creating an ambient presence with real, non-static, information and messages.

Conversive Interaction

Architecting the user journey is not just about simplifying task flows that are intuitive or presenting timely information that’s clear. There’s a greater opportunity to create a real conversation through interaction. It’s about allowing people to adapt to the strengths of a product, and conversely, developing a product that reciprocates the learning to adjust to people’s preferences. Behavior shifts can be a two-way channel when artificial intelligence is smartly applied on a human scale.

Product Design As Ecosystem Design

Pervading home energy devices are impersonal boxes that can be complex to set and often not connected with other utility devices. With technology available today, British Gas is able to reinvent the device experience by enabling each device to talk with one another—unifying and transforming discrete product experiences into a single platform experience created by a networked interface. With an eye to designing devices that are iconic and inspiring, the key is about integrating smarter functionality that makes people’s energy consumptions progressively easier to manage and control. It’s about applying conversive interactions that result in true personalization. By designing for portability, the re-envisioned smart devices can shift brand perceptions, thus opening new interactions and opportunities with their customers.

Naming Direction

Product and service names that thoughtfully express British Gas’ brand tenets of simplicity, honesty and forward thinking add depth to the everyday experience of the brand. Invention, foresight, and new business models allows British Gas to extend their explorations of new services and help distinguish themselves from competitors in the growing smart home market. A naming strategy for families of devices enable people to consciously connect platform, services and products with one another while associating British Gas with innovation. The following are three naming directions with differing themes that frame a new product experience proposition.

Packaging Concept

It’s critical to be tactically simple and practical while being visually clear and appealing. But to transcend retail spaces, the packaging for a family of smart devices should reflect the 200 years old British Gas brand in a new, even magical way. Developing a new physical language that heralds the product/platform experience, the design intends to generate interest, wonder, and desire while bringing a modern light to an established brand. The element of the flame represented as a ribbon on the logo serves to anchor the design, physically creating a branded presence. Meant to invite touch and be picked up, the translucent quality, modern typography, and graphic simplicity make for a pronounced presence ready to stand out in any environment.

Towards An Experience Centered Ecosystem

Technology is fueling the rapid transformation of markets. It’s vital to view such shifts as opportunities to grow instead of framing it like a threat. For commodity suppliers, it’s no longer about dominating siloed verticals, but about developing ecosystems that synergistically produces new offerings, create efficiencies, while seeding ideas to enter or develop new markets. It’s not about compromising the core proposition of a brand, but about seeing invisible connections and creating new alignments to reinvent things.