Brand-Centric Designs are Shifting to Focus More on Users

It's happening; the focus of design is shifting from being brand-centric to being users centric. Appiness Interactive, a digital consulting firm, believes that every design needs to ensure optimum users experience, not radical changes in the structure just to create shock and awe. "We do not want to reinvent the wheel", they say. Below, they put on a little show and tell.

Wow.jobs.

The driving force behind any good design should be user experience. And to accomplish that, exhaustive steps need to be undertaken to deliver a UX which is simple and functional for users. A designer's expertise determines how an optimum solution to a problem is sought and solved.

Before Wow.Jobs manifested, a study of insights was necessary. Appiness, therefore, dug into the minds of jobseekers to try and see what kind of problems and questions they possess. 'Do I have a good resume?', 'What should I include in it?', 'Which format is the most preferred?' and the list was endless.

That's when a platform was created which would create the apt resume in just 2 minutes. Problem solved!

That later grew to also cater to other aspects of the job search process. From creating a resume to applying for a job, Wow.Jobs makes the process of finding a job in today's world easy, efficient and simple. Minimalistic, intuitive and experimental in its design, Wow.Jobs uses bleeding edge technology and proprietary algorithms to give users a flawless experience.

People are accepting technology quicker than brands today. It explains how Gmail showed the way to Yahoo mail and how iPhone showed the way to Nokia. We need to adapt according to people and not vice versa.

Sakra World Hospital.

Website design for Sakra World Hospital is another example of how one can stay ahead in the game by making the most of the latest technology. It's quite a frequent observation that most hospital websites look the same. It's easy to tell that much vision and thought hasn't gone into them.

What was done differently was putting the users first; a fact that most brands don't consider. It involved no fancy stuff, but rather being straight to the point. The objective was to give priority to all the elements that make up a hospital. A design based on Gestalt Design psychology was thus put together, with immediate and most urgent features placed at the top folds and rest of the information towards the end. What's more, an innovative solution called site speed acceleration was also embedded to make such a heavy website load like a dream, no matter what the device or internet speed. The moral of the story is to create design that supports function rather than simply being an element stagnant in space.

Dhruva.com.

Brands and clients are waking up to digital media. Well, better late than never! Gone are those days where you can satisfy users with few static web pages. Device fragmentation has become a nightmare; one has no idea which device users are browsing your website from. Dhruva, being India's largest gaming companies, they had to sooner or later tap into this territory, to completely own it. That's when Dhruva.com came about.

It's important though to note that the web is not a standalone medium, when it comes to marketing. It has to work in tandem with the rest of the channels to ensure a seamless integration across branding activities. It's an agreed fact that human beings have an irrational attraction towards happiness. It is always the first impressions that shape up the way you think about anything. That is why brands try really hard to create a great first impression. People do not have enough time today, and the time to attract them is decreasing down to the first few milliseconds.

In terms of a website, an attractive homepage is very important, to ensure you have the attention of the users. That's why Dhruva.com opens with an HTML 5 video. It is also important to ensure that you deliver that first impression without any delay and without any flab. But this doesn't mean that you create a web presence that doesn't have any connection to the rest of your brand identity.