Making a website memorable is not an easy task, competitors are everywhere and everybody wants users to remember their brand. That’s the most logical reason why every website would need a brand with its proper logo. But that’s not the only reason.

Including branding in the whole website design could also improve usability, making a particular website a more comfortable place to surf through. Many companies are taking advantage of this, Apple, for example, is not only successful because of a beautiful design but they also combine easiness and first class interaction design to the whole branding and marketing strategy on the web.

In this bread crumbs example the Apple logo shows the user the safe way back home:

Tag Line

Adding a tag line to the logo is another way to improve the overall website usability and could also have a direct impact on visits. The message to deliver here is called the “value proposition” and the aim is to tell users what the goal of your site is (e.g. what you are selling!). If the user is not able to figure out fast what the site is about, he or she might leave to never come back.

The tag line is usually placed below the logo or very close to it. It should be a short phrase explaining in a very easy language what the website has to offer. It also has to be precise and should not use estrange words, like site-related ones.

Wikipedia makes very clear what the website is about. The free encyclopedia.

Is Safari a website about trips in Africa or is it one dedicated to a web browser? This tag line does not confuse users, it tells them straight away that this site has online books. 

Sometimes the tag line is integrated into the website functionality. For example, del.icio.us places the logo, the company name and the most meaningful link of the website together. "Your bookmarks" gives a strong message.

Logo position 

Logo position is another example of how branding could improve usability. There is a tendency to place the logo on the upper left corner, but that’s not the most important issue regarding the logo position. The key is to place the logo in the same place website-wide. That will orientate users and remind them that they are still in the same website.

At Amazon, the logo stays in the very same place through the entire website.

 

The user experience as brand

More is less, right? This is true for many fields but specially for web design as adding links, buttons, features, information and pictures is always tempting. More than designers, [many] programmers have the opinion that if a feature is available it should be presented to the user. User tests prove that that could be dangerous.

The aim of any product should be to create a positive user experience, something that users will consciously or unconsciously notice and appreciate. Usability has a strong impact on the user and that’s why it could be used as a branding approach. Branding is the packaging for a particular idea, like an easy to use and effective search engine could be. The following pictures show two websites offering basically the same service. But which brand has more value for the user? the one filling the page with features?

Emails, usability and branding

Emails are part of the website design and they could improve the overall user experience, here the brand could also be an important tool to help users. A key issue is the brand (the company name) included in the sender field of every email sent by a website. It seems to be obvious but many websites send notifications with the sender field "mail robot" (notice that many users would label that as spam.)

In this email client screen shot it is possible to see the sender field in the first column and the subject in the second column.

Germanwings, an airline, places the company name in the sender field of each email. But they have variations:

Germanwings > This means "advertisement", it could be deleted,

Germanwings Schedule Cha. > This means that the email contains very important information,

Germanwings Booking > Meaning that this email could be saved (and retrieved) for later reference.

The impact of using these techniques could be huge as they could prevent user from deleting important information and save a big amount of money in live customer service.

Trust

Giving users a feel of trust is something that could be done through a good design and attaching the idea of trust to a brand something usually desirable. One approach is to encourage trust through security features shown on a website.

A good label for the login button could improve a website and brand trust. Like at Amazon.com:

If a person knows that undoing a buy is easy (and possible) the trust a customer has for a service will be increased. For example at Wal-Mart deleting products from the shopping cart is easy:

Conclusion

A login box should be simple, easy to use and should make users’ life easier.  It’s not that simple to achieve that, believe me. Not only the login box functionality and design are important but also the environment: avoid distractions and those users will log in.

Here I collected a few examples of design and behavior.  

I don’t want to criticize this websites, they are mostly nice ones. I’ve just used them as examples (of good and bad design). Please keep in mind that design mistakes could be the result of the lack of time and money.

Making the login easy seems to be an obvious task. Apparently simple login processes are not always easy to find. I have written several articles about this topic because there are so many bad examples, I have to insists. Why login processes should be simple?

Users will be entering into your website services through the login process, this is a tedious task that nobody likes. But this could be worsen if you make the login process not easy to understand. Most of the cases it is enough if you ask for a login name and password, making the process as short as possible.

Movable Type makes users to waste their time, this is not the right usability approach. First, users have to click on "Customer Sign In". Then a totally unnecessary page is displayed, making users read some instructions. Another click and you get to the login page.

Now an example from a company that cares about usability, YouTube. They place the login in the homepage. What Movable Type does in 3/4 steps, YouTube does it in 1.

The importance of a well designed sign up process is huge, if your website does not make it easy visitors will not register. Don’t ask for unnecessary information, make the from short, you can always encourage users to give you more details once they are already using your website.

"Your website should also avoid long instructions…"

Placing a link to your privacy policy makes people feel safer, make it visible during the whole process. Your website should also avoid long instructions, users will never read them and if you need them anyways that means that your sign up process is too complicated.

Shutterstock, an online image bank, got a not so user-friendly sign up process design for photographers (is not the same as the one for buying pictures). They require to fill a long form, but the worst thing is that they require to scan and upload a passport.

From the usability point of view this could not be worst. They required the scan after you fill the first long form. What happens if you don’t have a scanner close to you? I can imagine a lot of angry users. Plus, this is a very old fashioned way of identity validation, many users would be concern about their privacy. Even worse (if possible) they ask for a passport that matches your name and address, so I could never sign up to this service because I live in Germany but I am not German and I don’t have a German passport (and the address is not on my passport anyways).

Once again, usability has a direct economical impact. I wonder if this bad design is the reason Shutterstock has been loosing traffic in the last months (according to Alexa.com).

Login process should be extremely easy as this is they way users will get into the personalized content of your website. Many users get tired and leave if they try to login a few times and they can not get into the website. Specially new users leave and don’t come back.

Avoid unnecessary information or distractions. 9rules, the social content network, tells users that the password will be emailed when the are at the login page. This is confusing as usually sites don’t send emails during the login process.

Making a mistake introducing the username or password takes users to the signup page. In this particular case, this is really bad as no error message or password recovery link are displayed. If you want to improve usability and your general web design, I would recommend, first to nicely tell the user that there was a mistake, and after that give an easy way to solve the problem (in this example would be a “try again” or “recover login info”)

It’s good to give users a kick way of login into your website. Make your login input box or link visible, usually users look for it on the top right corner of the website. Like, for example, Photobucket.

On the other side, a bad design example could be Safari Books Online, an online book database. It’s so annoying to me that they don’t have a login box in the homepage! Instead they have a “Subscribe” link. Tricky, eh?

Today I had to look for the registration email to get the link they sent me to search books. Safari was obviously not thinking in the user but in the potential customer when they designed their homepage. Already registered users have to remember to go to the subdomain search.safaribooksonline.com in order to actually use the service they are paying for.