Building Branded Product Experiences with Jon Howell, formerly Lyft

Episode Transcription

Jon:

How do you get buy-in on building branded experiences? Because it's a weird place. It sits between marketing and brand and product design. And it's kind of the gray area in between the two teams.

Christian:

This is a Better Product original series on product brand. I'm Christian.

Anna:

And I'm Anna.

Christian:

Before we jump into this episode, I want to pause and invite you to join our upcoming speaker series. It's five weeks, five speakers with countless product insights starting October 28th. You can register by going to betterproduct.community/speaker-series. So again, that is betterproduct.community/speaker-series. And in case you're wondering, the dash is a hyphen, if you want to be official about it. But anyway, if that's too long of a link to remember, just go to our community site to get connected.

Anna:

Okay. So this episode we've got Jonathan Howell who is the Brand Experience Design Lead at Robinhood. When we first interviewed Jon, that's what he goes by, he was the Brand Experience Designer for Lyft. And before Lyft, he was with other notable brands, such as Twitch and Survey Monkey.

Jon:

Jump between working on small design agencies, to product teams, to brand teams inside of product teams, bridging the gap between brand and product design and figuring out how both teams can work better together.

Christian:

As you heard him share, no matter his role, his career connected product and brand. When he joined Lyft, he was looking to be part of a product design team specifically.

Jon:

Well, I spent some time prior to this at Microsoft working on Power BI as a product designer. And that was kind of my first venture into product design. I knew that working on brand design teams in the past, there's little to no entry point into working on the product. Your vehicles for delivering brand are limited to social blogs, other marketing channels that don't really touch the product. And so being able to work on a brand inside of a product was super exciting for me because it isn't often that these two teams talk together. They kind of work in silos. Brand and marketing teams have their specific deliverables. And then on the product design side, there's an entirely different set of deliverables that they're responsible for delivering. And so bridging the gap between the two is something that I hadn't seen in a lot of places I had worked before.

Anna:

Here, he had the unique opportunity to infuse brand into the product. And it's truly unique as product and brand teams are often siloed working on their specific areas of focus.

Christian:

As I shared before, my background is in UX design. And from my experience, it's always felt like there's a gap between the UX design and product design community on what the role of brand really should be. So to kick things off, I asked Jon, how do you convey what brand is and how should it interact with the product?

Jon:

Having experience working on both teams in the product design org, I think there's less thought about how we inject brand into the product. But really, ultimately what brand can do for product is building trust, driving brand preference and creating affinity ultimately leads to brand loyalty over time. By building brand and product experiences, you're able to shape and mold the way people perceive and talk and think about your brand. And so if there's a way to do that inside of a product experience that gets people to fall in love with the product, it'll keep users coming back and create loyalty within them.

Christian:

So from my perspective, Lyft has always had a really strong brand, and it was really distinct. It was always clear to me, even not having even used the service, what that experience is going to be like. It was a little bit quirky. It was very people helping people. It's a service that you're getting rides from, but there is Lyft itself that establishes that brand. So what's a specific project or something you worked on that communicates how you actually do that?

Jon:

In between ride share programs and our competitors, there is the sense of it is an application to get a ride from point A to point B. As time has gone on, it's almost just become more utilitarian. As time goes on, these things become so utilitarian that if you're not thinking about how the brand comes to life in the product, the switching costs for people to stay loyal to your brand is devalued over time. So specifically talking to a project that I worked on recently was our LyftUp Initiative. So LyftUp essentially encompasses a variety of programs that Lyft does to give back to the community. And so within LyftUp, we have grocery access, we have bike share access, voting access, jobs access, and also most recently the COVID-19 response to giving essential transportation to places like grocery stores.

We're providing free Lyft rides with scooters and bike memberships to people on the front lines. So a thing that we did... I helped with the launch of LyftUp inside the product experience. So as you know it today, if you go into the donate tab within Lyft, there's a feature called Round Up and Donate where you can pick a charity and give back to your community. This is one of the things that we believe is one of the key differentiators between us and our competition, is this is a way that we can help impact how people think about Lyft over our competitors. If you know, let's say for example, you live in Chicago and your kids go to school there. And every time you take rideshare, you're rounding up and donating your fare to Chicago public schools. The next time you go to call a ride and you know that you're rounding up and donating your fare, those $2, isn't going to help you drive preference. The fact that you're giving back to your community and making an impact, that will help drive your preference and what ride share company you're going to choose.

Anna:

I think that's a really good example of it because I do the Round Up and Share. And something you said that I didn't even realize that I do personally, and this is going to be very anecdotal, but I used to switch back and forth to find the best price. And I never do that anymore. I haven't done that in years. But I did initially when I was still using the services side by side, and I think Round Up and Donate is one... The Amp that you talked about, the Amp and the car that has the color, I absolutely love when I get a Lyft that has that because number one, I know I can see it by color, especially I'm in a crowded place. And number two, it always says, "Hi, Welcome Anna," when I get in the car. And I just absolutely love that. And I think it just really, really ties to that brand experience touch point you talk about.

Jon:

Yeah. And it's great that you bring that up because I used to work on the Amp team. And one of the things that we implemented is in our top 15 markets, depending on which airport that you fly into, we had a customized message depending on the airport that you were in. So if you got picked up in Vegas, for instance, and you called your car, you got in, it would say, "Hi Jonathan." And it would have a slot machine animation on the back of the Amp. Kind of theme based upon the market.

In Arizona it'd show cactuses. If you would go to New York city, it'd show the city skyline scrolling down through the backside of the amp and welcome you. Figuring out how we can lean into emotional moments within the product experience, especially in a physical and digital space.

Christian:

Just a note to our listeners, airports were those places people used to go to, to fly to other cities. I just want to remind everybody. Okay, emotional moments. You said that in a way that sounded official. I don't know if it is. Is that your phrase or is that something that you guys on the Lyft team are kind of looking for? Is that a part of your methodology?

Jon:

So in part, we're trying to figure out how we can justify why brand experience design is important to our organization. And so, one of those things is how can we build trust and drive preference, but also ultimately creating affinity and loyalty to create more loyal customers? And in doing so, if we were able to identify a specific experience, and identify the emotional highs and lows, and find a place where we're able to lean in on a user's emotion, this is a way we can build trust and preference by creating a relationship with them. Oftentimes brand experiences are sometimes confused with Easter eggs or surprise and delight where there's this idea of exploding confetti. And that's not specifically... That's one component of what you can use to lean into an emotional part of a product experience. But it isn't everything.

Say, for instance, you're in a Lyft and you're heading to a job interview and you're going over the Bay Bridge. And as you're going into the Bay Bridge, this next exit's coming up and the driver passes the exit, and you're going to be late to your job interview. And now you're really frustrated. Maybe this is a way that we can lean into a negative experience and talk about... We know that the car has deviated from its original route. And so maybe we send a 20% or 50% ride coupon on your next ride because we're empathizing with the fact that you're experiencing a negative emotion within the ride. And so we're able to create a moment within that experience and lean into that. And create something that is not so much a positive moment, but showing that we care and we're there, and we want to help improve your experience within the Lyft platform.

Christian:

I think it's inspiring to hear you describe leaning into psychology because I think a lot of designers, when they go to design school, think they're going to get to do that. And then you get out in the world and it's like, no. Those are always nice to haves. And like you said, you maybe get someone to throw some confetti or animate something goofy. So I'm curious, how does Lyft reinforce the value of those things? Not just the company culture, but in the way that you prioritize work. How do you sit down and say, take the importance of these emotional things? And how do you weave that into your work to make sure that it isn't just a, oh, we'll do this if we have time?

Jon:

Funny you bring that up. That's something that I'm constantly trying to meet with our product managers with and our specific product teams. So working within core design, I'm able to work horizontally. So if I'm working with the driver team or the rider team, or Lyft bikes and scooters, or autonomous, or transit, I sit down with their product managers and their designers, as well as their engineering team. And we have brainstorming sessions. I think the first point of contact obviously is the designers. And then hopefully there's some positive connection there with the product managers and figure out, okay, we do see a value in this because like you mentioned, there is that kind of, oh, this is a nice to have, we'll revisit this at a later time. And oftentimes that doesn't really happen. It gets pushed out and then we move on to the next feature.

What is the next thing that we can ship? Not let's improve on a specific thing we've already done and make that already great experience really memorable so that maybe people share it. I think the way to weave that into the experience is building a close connection and trust with your internal teams. So a lot of what I do here at Lyft is build strong interpersonal relationships with both the brand design team, the marketing org and the tech teams, which are like product management, engineering, and product design. And so as you're building those interpersonal relationships with them, you start to gain trust, and they start to bring you into the fold in terms of their planning process. And telling them, "Hey guys, we should really consider budgeting a specific amount of time out for how do we build an emotional connection with users from getting people picked up from the airport from point A to point B? Where within that experience, can we emote, can we identify, the emotional highs and lows?"

And then you pick a specific thing. Maybe it's when they're waiting on the curb and they're getting picked up, what can we do there? Or maybe it's a specific example with that experience. But I think building those interpersonal relationships with teams and gaining their trust is the first step to injecting the brand into the product and getting them to believe that brand experience is important. And I think a lot of what we'll talk about today is how do you get buy-in on building branded experiences? Because it's a weird place. It sits between marketing and brand and product design. And it's kind of the gray area in between the two teams.

Anna:

Actually, I'd love to know, how do you get by it? You build these great connections, they let you in on the planning process and you work very closely with them. How do you get them on your side?

Jon:

It's oftentimes not self-initiated projects that, hey, here's a thing that we've thought of to help drive preference. A lot of times it comes from the specific product teams. Mainly because if we were to think of how we can impact drivers and get them to love Lyft, we don't have an engineering team. We're relying on the engineering resources from the specific product team that we work with. The same thing goes with the product managers. So initially when this team had started, we had a dedicated product marketing manager, we had a dedicated product manager. We had a dedicated engineering team, which is essential in building these things because prior to that, we were able to build experiences or prototypes to say, okay, we can plug in with this other engineering team. So we can bring the brand experience engineering team and a driver engineering team and work on the specific thing that's going to... Maybe it's a surprise and delight moment. But in terms of getting buy-in, what we do is... Depending on the project we get a lot of different projects that come in.

Some of them are really big projects like working on identity for Lyft Pink, which is our new membership program, from also how can we introduce sound into the ride experience? So very different projects. One's more focused on brand identity, what the product experience is like in bridging the gap between brand and product. And then some are very tactile projects. So it's not so much buy-in, it's figuring out how we can budget amount of time to work with those teams based upon the limited resource they've had from their planning phases. Because they're planning months out in advance. So when we come in last minute of, hey, we got this partnership with HBO for Game of Thrones. Let's do some flying dragons across the launch screen. Or let's put Westeros on the map out by a large body of water. That takes time. That takes resources. And so we can't come in last minute and do that. So we have to build into their planning phases and drive a cultural shift in the ways in which we think about building new products and features.

Christian:

When you talk about building trust, a part of that to me is being able to prove some sort of value, which is yet another nebulous area of design. There's research validation and things that you can do. But I think overall brand is a tough spot because it's hard to sort of reflect back, why did this actually help in some way? So do you have any metrics or anything that you do look for, or do you have anything that you do in your methodology where you go out and talk to people to maybe not necessarily prove that brand is impactful, but at least to create some story that helps get everybody on board with what it does?

Jon:

Yeah. I think that is one of the most common struggles that our brand experience design team struggles with is, how do we create the fact that our impact over time is what's valuable? If we create a brand moment inside of an experience, we're not going to say, oh, look at our brand preference tracker. This is how the impact has made over this one experience over time. We're not going to be able to point to one specific thing and say, oh, this has increased brand preference. Or this has helped to build more trust with users. It's multiple experiences over time that help shape the way people perceive us. And so if we're able to do that and play the long game, I think that's where we'll have the most impact. But our metrics, the way we talk about... Our metrics could be... Let's say in the past, we've had this thing called local promotions, which is the cars change to specific icons for a specific holiday or a different mode that you can put in a coupon code.

And so if during Halloween we change the cars to pumpkins... Now we can't say two months down the road, oh yeah. We changed this. We've been changing the car skins to these fun icons. This isn't a correlation to driving brand preference, but it's the multiple experiences after that. What else are we doing beyond just changing the car skins? What is the in ride experience like? How do we get more people to sign up for Round Up and Donate and give back to their community? And so that's what helps shape why brand experience is important, but also there's different things that we track.

Let's say for instance, we do a partnership with somebody that's launching an album or something like that, or we're doing something with celebrities that we've done in the past. You've probably seen some of the videos that we posted online. The social impact there, the social impressions, we definitely look at that as metrics. In terms of the product design org, there's different metrics that they measure, right? Like how do we increase rides by creating a specific feature? But that's not always the case with brand experience design because it's an emotional thing. It's how we shape the way people think. Ride bookings or things like that.

Christian:

Do you talk to customers yourself? Does your team talk to them or do you have a team that goes out and stays connected to riders and drivers?

Jon:

Yeah, so we have a whole user research team. I think there's roughly about 20 people on it. And so depending on the project... When I used to work on the Amp team, we'd go to the driver hubs and we'd talk to drivers. And talk to them like, "Hey, where do you store the Amp? When do you use it most often? What's the biggest challenges you face in using Amp? What is your thought on the Amp? Do you feel like it's a free form of advertising for Lyft? What are the things that you like, or you don't like about this, and how can we improve the experience? What are some other things that we might not have thought about as people that aren't driving on a daily basis? Now we can inject into the brand experience and the product experience. Ultimately working on brand experiences trying to unite both our brand and product experiences.

Anna:

So when it comes to ideas for really amazing brand touch points, talking about your research, are you inspired by the research that you hear? Are you inspired by your experience as a consumer? How do these ideas kind of come together for the team and then how do you prioritize those ideas?

Jon:

A lot of the things that we work on, we take into consideration what our brand and marketing orgs are focusing on for that quarter. So that's kind of how we prioritize. So based upon our initiatives for that hill or that quarter, we'll figure out, okay, if we're focusing on XYZ maybe the driver team is the best way that we can impact this. So we'll work with the driver team on specific features. And I'm being generic because I can't say a ton about what the things that we're working on. But depending on the project, we'll say, "Okay, marketing wants to do this. This is the product team you need to work with. And so let's take a magnifying glass and look at the experiences within this that can help drive what marketing and creative is trying to focus on."

A lot of the things, as a one person team, that we face that are really challenging is relying on other teams to build products or features with no engineering resources, especially as a newly formed team. Our team was originally inside of the rider org. So we were specifically impacting how we can create rider preference. Since then, we've moved into our design systems team, or our core design team. So I work closely with our illustrators as well as their design systems team in trying to figure out how we can create frameworks for how teams can build into specific experiences. We've been working a lot on Lyft Pink, our membership program, and figuring out how do we create an experience from requesting a ride to managing your account? And so you create consistency across the board. And then how do we create an elevated experience that doesn't divert from the core Lyft experience?

So a good example that I like to reference is Amazon. So as an Amazon Prime member, you probably don't notice the things within the user interface that have changed. For instance the top tab bar is a lighter shade of green as compared to a normal Amazon user. So if you download the Amazon app, and you're not signed into your Amazon Prime account, there's slight things within the experience that are different. Obviously one of the things that we did for Lyft Pink was we want to make it financially irresponsible for people to not be a part of Lyft Pink. That's similar to the motto of Amazon. It's financially irresponsible to not have an Amazon Prime account because of all the two day shipping and all the other benefits, Amazon Video. But there are things within that experience that change, but going from an Amazon account to an Amazon Prime account, isn't drastically different. But you get all those benefits.

So that was our goal with Lyft Pink is, how do we create an elevated experience, provide these perks and benefits, but not detract from the core experience of Lyft? But also helping to build an emotional connection with people. So they love it, and they see the value that Lyft Pink brings them. Why is it worth 19.99 a month to be a part of Lyft Pink? Because you're getting free bikes and scooter rides, because you're getting surprise upgrades every now and again, you're getting different benefits that you see value in. Again, that's what we're helping shape. I think earlier, Christian, you mentioned how you get people to think a certain way. And that's kind of how I got into design doing cringey band posters back in the day. It was like, how do you get people to show up to a show by just a little piece of paper that's sitting on a light post?

And again, yes, a lot of designers think that, okay, how can we plug into emotional design and shape the way people think about brands or products? And it kind of started from that as you're designing a print poster, and depending on how interesting it looks, you might go to that show if you don't know the band, right? That's the whole idea around gig posters. And bringing that to life in a product experience is even more exciting. There's so many other touch points in working with the brand team and working with the product team is like, we can do experiential design.

Or we can do Undercover Lyft or there's these really touching videos that we've made in the past called Hello, Paloma. And it talks about how one of our drivers provided assistance to victims in Vegas that were in the shooting and driving people to the hospital. And it really touches home and how you connect with the brand. I swear, every time I watch the video I tear up. After this you should really watch it. And I think that's the thing that helped shape the way... Why people love the brand. And then if we can do that more in the product experience, that will just lead to more loyalty overtime.

Anna:

It seems like the brand is so interdisciplinary, the brand experience specifically. It has to touch the product. It has to touch the content. It touches the marketing, it touches the physical devices. It seems like you have to be able to kind of work with so many different stakeholders, so many different teams. What do you think makes a really good brand experience designer?

Jon:

I feel you have to be a very multidisciplinary designer in order to work on brand experience, because like you said, you'll work on hardware, you'll work on essentially every brand touch point that the customer interacts with. And you're going to use that as an opportunity to help shape the way they think about the brand. Depending on where you're situated inside an organization, whether you're working on the digital experience or you're working on the brand team where you're able to work on specific activations or events or campaigns, where you can create physical goods, great. I think being able to identify your niche in what you believe that you're really good at is the way to plug into a brand. So if you want to go work at one of your favorite brands and you want to work on brand experience design, you figure out where are you going to have the most impact?

Is it a digital product? Then you probably want to try and find a way into the product design org. If it's something like let's say Allbirds, or some type of physical good company, then you might want to specialize in illustration. Or I think, again, there is so many touch points within brand, as voice and tone can have an impact. Illustration can have an impact. Product design can have an impact brand. Creative can have an impact. I think brand experience as a discipline is fairly new. I think there's some really good books out there that talk about designing for emotion. There's a book by Aaron Walter that talks about that, or building brand experiences by Darren Coleman. They kind of talk about how you can infuse brand into the product. But I don't think that there should be one person specifically responsible for delivering branded experiences in the product.

Ideally, this person that's within an org is helping to drive a cultural shift in the way that the other product designers and the other brand designers think about building experiences, because it can't be a one person team that's going to have to touch all these things and all these places within an organization and have an impact. You're trying essentially to boil the ocean, when what you should be doing is talk to other people within the org and give them the elevator pitch of what you want to do. And then if hopefully you get buy-in or you get excitement from them, they can start to kind of infiltrate other areas of the organization.

And then you're not having to bargain for time within the planning phases because they know it's important. They're going to build it into their planning. And they're going to budget time for that. I think with small teams, if you're working on brand experience design, you should build strong interpersonal relationships and find allies within your org so that you can spread brand experience design or bring brand to the product like wildfire.

Christian:

That's great. I just want to maybe ask one more question that might be a little leading because we're trying to get at from you what... Anna asks, what does a good brand designer need to have? And I feel like you may have that you haven't articulated even quite yet is just a knowledge. It's almost like a knowledge of design's place. It seems like you have a pretty good understanding of where brand impacts. It's not that you have to sit there and create numerical proof of brand impacts, like we created this many more engagement, so this many people open the app. So therefore we've done a good job.

But it does seem like you've got a pretty good understanding of how to communicate and almost translate the work that you do to the people who need to do it. So assuming that's true, because you're speaking on it pretty well, I'm curious, how do you keep that side of your mind sharp? How do you make sure that you're not just focusing on the sexy shots on Dribble or Behance and just in it for the hearts? And how do you connect the design work into the business, how do you manage that?

Jon:

Yeah. So if we're trying to index on impact, you look at the core experience of what you're working within. For me, working on the writer team, I was able to put myself into the shoes of users. I was able to request a ride, get picked up, get dropped off somewhere else. And one of the things that I felt was core to the experience is I'm heading to a party and I want to share my ETA. And so what it does is it sends an SMS message to somebody saying, "Hey, my Lyft is on the way." This was an opportunity where I think we can inject using [inaudible 00:26:12] awesome illustration or animation within this experience that some people might've not thought about. So I partnered with our illustration team to create an illustration that was specific to sharing your ETA. And another idea that we've kind of thrown around is, what if we created location specific illustrations based upon the market that you're in?

So let's say I'm traveling to go see a friend in Portland, and I'm getting a ride from the airport to their house. And I'm sharing my ETA on the time I'm going to meet them at their house. Let's say the illustration has trees in the background, or has geo-specific things within the illustration. Those are the things where you can kind of put yourself in the shoes of the product that you're working on and identify the things that people might have not thought about, or things that might've slipped through the cracks. That's how you turn great experiences into memorable experiences. Things that people didn't think about. A good example of this is like on Twitter, when it's your birthday, there's balloons that float up from the bottom of the screen, you're able to pop them. The same goes if you visit somebody's profile that it's their birthday.

That thing is not going to drive brand preference over time. But it's the thoughtfulness that a team focus their time on celebrating you and celebrating your birthday. And so people even share that. If you go on Twitter right now and you type in Twitter birthdays, you'll see screenshots of people celebrating the fact that Twitter gave me balloons for my birthday, or where are my Twitter balloons? And so I think looking at those small things that might've slipped through the cracks, and figuring out how you can build something that creates an emotional connection with users is the secret sauce.

Christian:

Well, this has been great. I really appreciate your time explaining all this. And I will share, just because you brought up the emotional side of Lyft... And you work there, so you may appreciate this. But my mom was a professor here and she was doing a stint at Berkeley and lived in Oakland, had an Airbnb, and she just randomly just shattered her knee tripping on a curb. And she didn't have a car or anything at the time. And so she called a Lyft and the Lyft driver picked her up off the side, got her in, waited for her at the ER. And then the whole time she was there, she only used Lyft because she had to have a wheelchair to teach because she couldn't walk. And it was always a Lyft driver was happily folding up her wheelchair, getting her out. It was a phenomenal experience.

I think it also hits home something too about the brand that you're trying to create there has to be backed up by the drivers. It has to be backed up by everybody. So it almost seems like maybe this is the evidence you need to know that you're doing a good job because my mom thinks of Lyft first and the Lyft driver is backing it up. And you can trust that we've got this brand experience we want, and we're going to trust that our drivers deliver on it. So thank you for sharing that.

Jon:

Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.

Anna:

Thanks for listening to the show this week. If you're looking for more resources on how to design, build, market, and sell better products, then head over to betterproduct.community to join well, the community. And as always, we're curious, what does better product mean to you? Shoot us an email at podcast@innovatemap.com.