#87 How we failed a podcast re-branding project
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It's interesting that seniors don't have such a big need for communicating that they get things super fast. So we can get each other in like three lines. We're going to understand what's going on and no amount of experience can replace communication.

Hello, design friends, and welcome to a new episode of Honest UX Talks. As always, I'm Joy Payan Fisa, and today we are going to share a very personal story of how we failed at rebranding Honest UX Talks. It's a very interesting story, I think, because it goes to show that however experienced or senior you are in an industry, you can still fall

under beginner traps, make silly mistakes and just not be efficient and in the end not be successful when you set out to run a design project. So we're going to share stories around how our rebranding project failed and why. And I think it's full of interesting insights, very relatable points and overall a nice cautionary tale that you're never too experienced to fail.

So with this intro in mind, I'm going to go ahead and ask Anfi, how was her last week? What is she up to? And just our regular intro. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the next episode. Super excited to be back again on track. I

I almost forgot how to do it, but I guess long story short, doing fine. I'm always sitting with the baby, obviously. However, also planning to start the masterclass or the course program that I kind of mentioned in the previous episode. So at the moment, I'm just preparing everything. We're going to have the strategy workshop to kick it off. We will have like a meet and greet, ice breaking games. And generally just like preparing all the calendar events, planning, scheduling, you know, making the thumbnails, all the organizational fun stuff.

that I'm definitely enjoying and not stressing out about. Fun thing is that now as I'm being a mother and I'm not rushing anywhere to the meetings, I don't have the same stress every day. I'm enjoying it because yeah, I only set the pressure for myself. I only set up the deadlines. I only communicate them. I'm not obligated to anyone to be on time and everything like that. So I'm literally enjoying this. And I feel like I'm planning much better as well because I gave myself one week for all the organization stuff. And that's like, whoa, I have so much time. I don't have to do it in the last night.

which is a very new experience to me, to be completely honest with you. Okay, so that's about it on my side. How about you? How is your new course going? I have seen the people sharing it around. Yeah, it's very exciting. So this week was the launch week for my course on AI for designers, which I launched in partnership with Interaction Design Foundation. And I shot it

this summer in Barcelona. So it's really exciting to see the fruit of that work and that intense period where I was building the course, writing everything, shooting, traveling, and just being very intense in the AI space. So the course is up. I'm already getting feedback, super positive feedback, which is always a surprise.

When you build something and put it out in the world, you don't know how it's going to be received, right? So even if you think it's good, it might not be received as such. Or if you think it's bad, you're always surprised when people appreciate it. And I've got tremendously positive messages so far. So I hope this trend will keep up.

The course is available on Interaction Design Foundation. In order to take it, you just have to have a membership with them. I offer a 25% discount on their annual membership, and we're going to link that affiliate link and the discount in the show notes. You can take it with a smaller price and then take all their courses. It's funny that this morning I was going over their website and I just saw that my course is signaled as the new course. And then right next to me is Don Norman's course.

So now I'm in the company of Don Norman on the same file, which is absolutely unbelievable. If I think about it, I'm overwhelmed. So I choose not to think about it too much. I just enjoy the process. I think it's really fun to create content that's more substantial. It takes a lot of effort. I think it's fun. I think for me, it was very discouraging. Anytime I was thinking about building a longer course or you've had a lot of experience building courses and you know very well what I'm talking.

It feels paralyzing in the beginning. But then once you take the smaller steps and then one step after another and then one chapter after another and then you just go there and shoot it and then somebody edits it and then you publish it and then you promote it and then all these steps link between themselves and build on top of each other. And so you get somewhere and it's unbelievable. That's something that felt impossible.

possible or just overwhelming is now a reality. So I'm very grateful for that and for the entire process and the learning that I personally gained. And so I hope people will enjoy the course about AI and I hope it ages nicely. I totally feel you with the curriculum and the beginning because every time I start a new program, I think this is the hardest step to build the curriculum, even though it looks like the easiest thing on a paper. What's in it, right? You just write the program and it's just a bullet point. What's hard about it?

But when I look back on the programs, it's like the hardest thing, the most fundamental thing is the program. And how do you process all the information you have, all the mess in your head, like all the things that are not necessarily nicely organized in your head, you have to organize it really nicely on the paper. And so it makes sense. And it tells a story and builds the understanding in a progressive way for people breaking down very complex concepts in a simple, very easy to digest by sized pieces, right?

So for me, this first step, this building curriculum step is always the hardest. And I usually spend much more time there than even recording and editing afterwards, even though those are timely things to do. So yeah, totally feel you. And I'm also feeling the same overwhelm right now because I'm only about to start this new program next week. So I'm very worried about how people will take it. You know,

the drill, how it feels like you never know how it's going to be taken, right? If people will understand it, if I'm speaking too fast, too slow, if my examples are making sense and all those questions, you know, yes, I will report back how it feels like. I'll be honest, but I'm definitely nervous at the moment. Anyways, let's go back to our episode and talk about our failure.

Our failure, yes, a very exciting topic, I know. Well, so for context, we agreed and we were very much aligned on the need for redesign for the branding and identity that Honest UX Talks has online, which means building an identity that resonates with our audience, deciding on whether we want to expand into new audiences or we want to just build a stronger relationship with our

current audience, understanding what that audience is, and just doing a lot of work around defining who we are and what's our message to the world and how we want to be perceived and how we want to represent ourselves. So we were doing all this, let's say, strategic, abstract thinking work. And then we decided to work with Branding Studio to help us bring our vision to life. A couple of things went wrong, but I'm going to jump to the outcome and then we can dive deeper into the process.

The outcome was that even if they provided us with four concepts, we kind of liked two of them and we asked them to refine them. Even with what we thought were very clear indications of the direction we want those concepts to go in, they failed to go in the direction that we were hoping for or we thought we were aligned on. And so we ended up not doing any rebranding and any redesign, which for me personally is extremely frustrating because I hate rebranding.

The current branding, I can't stand it anymore. I can't wait to have a fresh look. So even if we're like two designers and two very senior designers, we are unable to pull this project off.

It's unbelievable. I know. So let's dive deeper into what went wrong. And I'm going to start by asking you, what was your perspective on the context? So how does this need emerge? And what was our plan initially? Yeah, here we go. So you're right. Like to pick up from the context you just mentioned, we both are very frustrated because even the branding we have right now, it was very much done like

you know, scrappy, let's put something on because like we recorded the episode three years ago and without any overthinking, just put something out there without planning the branding and understanding the message and understanding the audience. We literally just throw it. And then we never had an opportunity or time to finally go back to it and re

think about, right? Who's our audience? Because now we have analytics. We now understand the interests. We understand what content is more engaging and stuff like that, right? So we kind of have the pulse of what we are aiming to build and what content we are aiming to produce. But however, we just never had the opportunity and space for us to build this, you know, rebranding project. So we had to go with something and we both built this hatred towards that visual style that we have at the moment. So now I'm on a maternity leave and I'm like, okay, let's do it finally, right? I can probably just find some agency and we can start doing the project

I personally couldn't do it, obviously, because I'm on maternity leave, so I cannot commit to any project. But we decided to invest our time and energy and money, obviously, into the branding. So I'm talking to one agency. They have a very nice portfolio. Like, seriously, when I looked into it, it's a Ukrainian branding agency. I wanted to support Ukrainian business. I started talking to them. I looked, they had like really great projects, really great, strong brands in their portfolio. I had no doubt it will be just great. And so when we started

communicating with them we started obviously from the strategy right so we have put together a slide deck full of information who we target our branding message how do we want to feel how do we want to be portrayed we literally went through all the important messages in my opinion because we started really strong like you typically start from any x project trying to establish the goals even like some sort of metrics some requirements for the business project and so i feel like

Everything was just starting out really nicely. We have a little bit of the discussion about the audience we want to be appealing towards. So we know that most of our audience is females, right? And we were thinking, should we just make it more female? Should we go towards the general audience?

you know all those questions we went through them and then you know threw it off waiting for the first concepts and we had about four concepts we discussed them briefly we were kind of leaning towards the two of them something in the middle and then i feel like when we received those first concepts this is when misalignment started happening on my perspective at least when we started discussing those concepts we didn't have like a strong opinions let's say so i was leaning towards one you want to maybe you're thinking towards the different concept we thought like okay let's just

iterate on those two concepts and see which looks better. And I feel like when we communicated this back to the agency, they also felt like, okay, two concepts instead of one, let's try. And then I think, again, this is where the miscommunication started building up because we just gave them the points. This is what we want to update. And they didn't think back on the objectives. They didn't look back on my opinion. Again, this is me reflecting and I don't want to blame anyone. I'm just trying to understand what happened there. But I think

On each of our sites, we did some sort of mistakes because we didn't say, we hate this concept. We didn't say strong opinions. Let's have a communication. Let's discuss. And then we went back to the agency and said, here are the points, fix those kind of, you know, in this way at least. I think they just fixed those without thinking, without looking back on the objectives, without trying to understand if this is still addressing the brief and objectives. And then they get back to us saying, this is the updates. And the updates didn't look really...

well, to be honest. I don't want to say anything bad, but it just felt like that's not us. The concepts didn't ring the bell with us, didn't feel right, as well as I think they also forgot to look back into the original brief because two months after we found ourselves looking back at the original brief and realizing that none of the concepts answered those briefs. Like, how did we end up here? So this is how it kind of went. And I will probably

go back to my key takeaways later on, but I also want to hear your perspective of what happened there and how we ended up with the concepts that didn't make sense and didn't answer the brief. Yeah, it's a very interesting, curious case of how we felt rebranding, right? So I think you touched on most of the key points. For me, what I would add to that was the fact that we were both leading very busy lives. You just had a baby. I was in the middle of reshaping my career.

and niching into AI and design, a lot of talks, a lot of courses. Our lives have always been very hectic and this period made no exception. And so I think that we didn't really put in the time to sit and think and reflect and everything we did, the conversations we had, they were sort of rushed and they were mostly on our Instagram chat.

Which definitely didn't help. And I think that we should have put in longer conversations like meet on Zoom and talk deeply, unpack everything. Maybe we should have had a workshop maybe with them. Everything was very telegraphic and very efficient in a way. So we were aiming for efficiency. We could do our branding ourselves, not professionally.

professionally, but it would be a very decent design solution. But we chose to externalize this exactly because we didn't have time. So we didn't want to spend time with it. That's why we had someone do it for us. So I think that's where it started to break, right? When we didn't properly align. We aligned on our Instagram chat, which is better than nothing, but it's not good enough. And it just

proved to be so. So that's the first mistake. And then also, I feel that we sort of, in a way, changed our minds. So we weren't consistent with our own directions. And there was another break. And for me personally, that I noticed reflecting back, we gave them some inspiration, like a mood board. Here are the branding projects we like. Here's the style we want to go for.

And even in the initial output, I didn't see that inspiration reflected. The first four options weren't really aligned with the direction we wanted to go into, but we failed to notice that, like to realize that and give that feedback. Hey, wait, none of these concepts are essentially in the direction that we were hoping for. Can we have a new concept? So we tried to work with what they gave us, but they gave us something a bit off from what we gave them. So there was a perpetuating the miscommunication, right?

We entered this vicious cycle where we were giving feedback on something that we weren't happy with, like not even on a directional level. So I think that's where we should have stopped and be more firm and say, hey, wait, no, let's look at the starting point. Let's look at the brief. The ease feel a bit off brief and let's revisit this project or just not invest more time in it. But we did invest more time trying to work with what they gave us. And of course, the results were less than impressive.

exciting because the direction was less than exciting. I think those are the two points where things broke for us. And I think it's interesting that you say that seniors don't have such a big need for communicating, that they get things super fast, that we understand, yeah, I know how to do this. Okay, so we can get each other in like three lines. We're going to understand what's going on. And

no amount of experience can replace communication. Even with the branding agency, we should have talked more. I didn't even meet them. I should have met them in person, put in the effort, put in the time, be equally involved and so on. So I think that communication was what caused the failure of this project, but then also our own lack of clarity and our own changing of our minds when it comes to what we want, because we were sort of moving the post while we were designing. Like we changed our mind even in terms of styling.

I definitely want to also kind of wrap this reflection session up with like some points, takeaways, at least on my opinion. And I feel like I agree with you that just ultimately when I look back, I see this project as a great miscommunication example. It's always like, okay, yes, you're senior. You probably know how to do the communication. You know how to handle it. Yet, look where we are, right? If you don't put enough effort...

and energy, and mental headspace, you don't get the results you're looking for, right? It's not going to magically happen. So the point is that even if you're an experienced designer, you still have to put a lot of effort into working on the project. If you want to get somewhere, you're excited. Otherwise, magic will most likely not happen overnight. Somebody will not read your mind and will not come up with something that is not obvious, let's say.

And that's what I think ultimately happened with us. Looking back, I feel like we have three key issues with this kind of miscommunication general theme. First being we had a lack of clarity and alignment from the get-go. Even though we had the brief, we had everything kind of outlined in terms of what we want to achieve.

Again, the communication was not smooth. Like Joanna said, Instagram communication is not the most optimal one, especially when you're on the run and you just need to give a quick feedback. You know, that's not going to unpack all the problems and not going to give the space for realization if there is a problem. And then priorities change. I feel like we started from one space and then somehow we were like, okay, these are the given concepts. It's like when you have this domino effect, right? You start investing into something. You didn't have a time and mind space to acknowledge that it's not working. So you start building on top of that.

And that kind of gives the priority changes. And you don't realize in the moment, in the middle of the project, you don't look back into the objectives. So you're just given on top of what you see, reacting on something, and then that gives you a totally different direction, sort of. And so that changes the priorities as well, because you then look into those concepts and you're seeing, uh-huh, it does look like it's a completely different

concept kind of bring you to this change right and so that's not the point in my opinion some sort of priorities change not realization that you need to start from over right the fundamental was not the right one I think the last key or the last problem was that the branding agency we worked with I was expecting that they will actually challenge us as well I was expecting maybe that they will say okay we're

If we change this based on your feedback, how would we answer the briefing this way? You know, kind of like what we do as designers typically, right? We challenge back. We always ask hard questions. We look back into the objectives and trying to see if this is still answering the objective. And I think like this is the miss that we had in terms of the communication with the agency as well. Because we just gave them the feedback. They just updated based on the feedback. And so we never look back into why this feedback is matterless even. Like, you know, we were actually those...

bad clients giving you top-down feedback, basically took the orders and delivered it on that. They didn't take the courage to kind of challenge us back. You know, I feel like every collaboration is a partnership. Everybody is equal. It's not somebody's top-down sending you orders and you take it. I think it's very important that all of the partners look back in the original brief and realize if this is still working or not. If you just stop down, like sort of building the relationship in a hierarchical way, I don't think it's usually a very productive or fruitful relationship.

It's not going to bring you to the fruitful results. I feel like the last one is that also we didn't have hard conversations in the beginning. That's something we needed to do definitely better. I feel like we have this pattern of agreeing with each other because we often align on many things. We often talk to each other and like, OK,

yeah, I agree with you. I have the same idea or same point or my experience is very similar. And so we have this strong pattern of sort of supporting each other. It was like, yeah, yeah, I feel the same way. And context was that we are running somewhere, right? Ioana is in the middle of projects, creating the content and all the talks. And I'm like, you know, becoming a first time mom. I have a different mind space as well. We just agreed with each other. Okay, yeah, those concepts look good. Let's just proceed without realizing that let's actually stop for a second, meet and address those concepts.

good ones for us? Or should we just like say, I don't think it works. It doesn't sit well with me or something like this, right? We didn't tell those hard points to each other. We just maybe thought that it will work out eventually. It just didn't. I guess another point is that we just need to have this space. We didn't have this realization. We didn't have the opportunity to acknowledge that something doesn't work. And I feel like it brings to the last point that every creation, every creative project needs the space to reflect, especially in the beginning when you're still building a fundament. And we didn't have that.

So yeah, there are a lot of points, there are a lot of things that could go wrong, at least a lot of ideas of why we think it didn't work out. And I want to add one extra line that pretty much sums up or reflects everything that we've been sharing. I think that this project failed because everybody put in the bare minimum. And

I think that this is something that serves as the essence of this cautionary tale. The agency didn't challenge us. They didn't go the extra mile like we would expect them to. We were doing whatever we can in our survival mode, different reasons for being in survival mode and so on. So with bare minimum, you're going to probably fail or get the bare minimum.

minimum result. So jumping into the next part of the conversation, if we were to do this again, based on our learnings, which don't surprise us at all in a way we knew this might happen, but sometimes you just don't realize you're in the middle of executing mistakes. How would we start over? We will start over. We have to start over. We paid the brandings. We need to fix this.

So it can't stay like this. But how would we do it again? What's our plan? So essentially, I think that building on top of everything that went wrong and everything we've learned in this process, I would start by articulating a process for this rebranding. Like maybe we sit together and before talking about the branding, we should talk about how we want to do the branding. Yeah.

The first step would be for me and you to have the hard conversations and to have a scoping workshop where we just meet for two hours, open a mural board, and then just start working on articulating the vision, articulating the goals, maybe building a

quick mood board that we discuss, that we challenge, that we unpack, that we turn into. Here's what I like about this design and here's what I don't like. And here's what I expect in our rebranding. And here's what I hope will not be there or would be disappointing for me. And then just align between ourselves on what are our expectations, hopes and where we hope to get.

Maybe. And this is something I'm not sure you will agree with, but I would also enjoy if we came up with a rough concept like you come up with two, three concepts. I come up with three concepts and then we feed that into professional service to refine and expand.

expand and translate into different surfaces and mediums and so on and just take to the next level. But I think that since we are designers, I would leverage more our capacity to build visual storytelling. I would leverage more our capacity to show what we dream of, to show instead of telling each other what we expect, just show me how a brand you like would look for you. And then someone who is versed in branding more than us could take that concept.

further. So I would do it like that. I would even not even have a branding person, but oops, I'm not sure that's the best way to go about it. But I would actually just do it on our own if we feel like we're converging towards something. Another thing that I would do differently now is change the mindset. So sometimes designers feel like they're surgeons saving lives. There's so much pressure on this branding, rebranding. It has to be perfect. We're doing it once. Of course, we're not

doing it every year. We shouldn't do it every year. We're going to confuse people. We're building an identity here. This takes time, but we're not saving lives. I mean, we put so much pressure on us, both of us, for this to be perfect, to be ideal, to be right, to do it professionally. And I think that's a correct mindset for a designer. But like balancing that kind of pressure with

efficiency, right? Okay, so if we're procrastinating, if we're paralyzed because we want to make this perfect, how about we make it imperfect and then we can tweak it slightly or upgrade it or even change it if we don't like it. Like it's our own project. Yeah.

Right. It's our own playground. We can do anything we want. Yeah, I would take out the pressure we experience and just have more fun with this project. I think it's a very fun project above anything else and that we lost the fun element on the way and it just became a chore. It just became something that we have to do. We have to get right. We're going to hire professionals. The professionals are disappointing us and it all just became stressful. And I think it should be fun. This is how I would start differently now. And I hope we will. I feel like...

You're right in terms of having fun with this. I don't think we're like often in the space, the toughology, I guess. We don't have space to have the space, you know what I mean? Which is an interesting situation because this is now like rambling about just industry. But I feel like me, we as designers very often don't have that air space to really have fun, to enjoy what we're doing, to be passionate about it. We just have our deadlines and we keep kind of going towards those deadlines or having the pressure and delivering something. And that's what takes away this passion.

Because I definitely, when I'm thinking about it, I am still overthinking it. I cannot say that it will be easy for me to stop and say, hey, let's have fun. Because I'm like feeling stressed from knowing that I'm not good at branding. I did very few branding projects in my life. I can be good at strategy. I can be good with, you know, giving the direction. But when it comes to executing, I have no idea what to expect from myself. And that gives me this like, what's going to happen?

It makes me tense in terms of how do I have fun with being, you know, tense and not trusting myself with that. So that's what I guess causing a little bit of that overthinking and, you know, understanding that it's not going to be perfect. But you're right. Somehow we have to figure it out. I don't know why. I think it's just mindset that I personally have to also adapt and change a little bit.

Moodboard is something we also didn't discuss, but really quickly, I feel like moodboard is what you need to invest more time into, which we didn't do very well. We just throw a few links. Like here's a great brand, here's a great brand. But moodboard is really more overlooked and very important puzzle of every branding and identity kind of project because you're not just throwing like, here's a link. It's nice. We kind of need to look into what do we like about it? What works? What doesn't work? What sits well with us? What doesn't, right?

And we just throw links. And I feel like mood boarding is what needs to be very well defined from the early beginning. And we talked about the curriculum in the very beginning of this episode. I feel like mood board is this kind of curriculum for this project because it has to communicate with

well what you're trying to achieve. You really need to dissect every single brand in DNA to understand what is your DNA, what is not your DNA. And by throwing a couple of links, it's not going to explain itself, right? It's not going to communicate what you're trying to say. And again, like I said earlier, I don't think people can read between the lines and be on the same wave as you. Even if you feel like you align with some people which you're working with, you're not often. You still have different mindsets and different understanding. And it

interpretation. So yeah, I feel like we need to put more time and energy into defining the mood board. And I don't think it's usually done overnight. It's not like, I just remember a couple of brands and like, I'm going to throw them in this mirror board. It will take us a time, probably. It will take us time to come up with great ideas, mood board links, and dissect those links before we define our direction that we want to take in this project.

And so I guess that brings me to expectations for the audience. I don't think we're going to update the branding very soon, at least if we want to make it right. Maybe we're changing our mind, you know, behind the scenes with Joana, we agree that let's just put something else. Then in this case, you'll see us changing the branding pretty soon. But if we want to make it right, I feel like it will take us a little bit more time to think about it.

If anybody wants to help us, throw us ideas, feel free to do this. We will be really grateful to see it from the outside perspective as well. But yeah, I feel like it's going to go either way, either a very quick one, a very scrappy one, or a really thoughtful and, you know, learning from our mistakes on this project. So,

So I hope that this conversation was valuable for some parts, at least, because I think we can all translate all our mistakes into UX design process mistakes and stakeholder management mistakes and something that we've all done probably in our career at some point, kind of mistakes. So and hopefully we serve as a cautionary tale that you can never be too

proficient to avoid mistakes. Yeah. With this, I'm going to wrap this conversation up. I hope it was enjoyable and I'm excited to have more conversations with you next time. And if anybody wants to submit ideas for episodes, you can do it on Instagram or

either on our personal pages or on Honest UX Talks or anywhere. You can find us, even LinkedIn, whatever. Don't forget that under this Spotify episode, you'll find a little box there where you can throw how you listened to this episode. Anyway, thank you so much, everyone, for listening us through. And yeah, hoping you're having a great day. And we'll see you in the next episode. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye, everyone. Thanks for listening.