Today's "Ask Aspect" takes a different approach. While we've explored workforce management with industry veterans and discussed product innovation with our team, we haven't delved deeply into brand design—speaking to the people who have shaped Aspect's visual identity.
José Ocando is Aspect’s Lead Brand Designer and is one of the masterminds behind the refreshed brand identity. José came onboard with Aspect in July 2024, helping lead the rebranding charge with stunning design elements that set the company apart in the workforce management sphere.
As a key player in shaping Aspect's brand identity, José has spent countless hours optimizing website design to create a beautiful and intuitive user experience. His expertise caught the attention of Webflow, our CMS of choice, leading to his participation as a panelist in their webinar, "Scaling growth through website experimentation."
Let’s talk with José about his role in shaping Aspect's design identity, his approach to website experimentation, and how he balances the aesthetics and functionality of a workforce tech brand.
Q: What inspires Aspect’s brand design and identity?
Human-centered
In the early days of software design, interfaces were made to closely mirror the function they provided. Users had to learn the way the software works and they oriented themselves around it. Modern software seeks to orient itself around the people who use it. The best software is intuitive and easy to use.
Aspect is no different. In modernizing our software, we seek to design for the agent first. Things like exchanging shifts, requesting PTO, or noting your schedule preferences should take as few clicks as possible. It should even feel fun.
But, it goes beyond that. It’s not just about designing for the agent, but designing for the holistic person. When an agent is empowered to control their own schedule, they show up as their best selves at work.
Our brand is made by us. But it’s for the agents, administrators, and the analysts that use our software.
Inspired by the past
Having been founded in 1973, Aspect had a hand in creating the industry in which we now operate. There are folks working here like Mary Ward, Kelly Person, or our CEO, Darryl Kelly, who have been in the space for decades. That kind of experience is a treasure. When you partner with Aspect, you get access to all that institutional knowledge. And that same knowledge is driving how we design changes to our products and our latest innovative software, WFX.
It would be a shame, then, if our brand identity didn’t nod to our past. Visually, we’ve done that by including retro-modern elements in the brand that take inspiration from design in the 70s and 80s. And, in terms of strategy, our brand has focused on the open-handed sharing of our deep experience through thoughtful content pieces.
Driving forward
Despite more than 50 years of defining WFM and WEM best practices, there’s much more to be done. We’re innovating new software that makes complicated workforce scheduling more human-centered, more self-service, and more intelligent.
The Aspect brand must reflect our focus on crafting that future. It should be clean, simple, beautiful, and clear. It should present a compelling vision for thoughtful organizations that use our software to engage employees with care, scale their level of service, and grow their revenue.
"Our brand is made by us. But it’s for the agents, administrators, and the analysts that use our software." - José Ocando
Q: How does website experimentation guide the website design process?
All designers have the same problem. We assume that other people think like we think. The purpose of experimentation is to uncover how our customers think so that we can speak directly to their concerns. Our messaging must address their specific challenges, use the language they find the easiest to understand, and flow across the page with just the right level of detail.
I’ll give you an example. One of the things you learn as a designer is to always underscore benefits and not features. We designers care about features because that’s what we’re actively working on. But users only care about how features benefit them.
With that in mind I designed a section on the homepage that highlights the benefits of our entire WorkforceOS platform. As a “just in case”, I also designed a section much lower on the home page that lists the individual products in the suite.
I was legitimately shocked to learn through our website analytics that visitors tended to ignore the section on our platform’s benefits and instead engaged heavily with our list of tools. But, that taught me that before browsing our benefits, visitors just wanted to grasp at a high level what we do and what tools we offer. So, we moved that section immediately below the header and saved space for benefits on the individual product pages.
The cumulative impact of regular experimentation and data-based decision-making is that our website visitors get better clarity more quickly. And that means that the organizations who are good candidates for our software reach out to our sales team.
"We assume that other people think like we think. The purpose of experimentation is to uncover how our customers think so that we can speak directly to their concerns" - José Ocando
Q: What has been the most impactful design experiment on the site?
Early on at Aspect, I fell into the trap I mentioned above. We were determining the best language for requesting a demo. When I shop for software, I’m much more likely to try something if I don’t have to talk to a salesperson to see pricing or to get a trial. I assumed that our website visitors would feel the same.
We tested 6 variations of button copy. I assumed a low barrier button like “Get a tour” would perform the best. To be safe, I added “Contact sales” to the experiment thinking that it would perform poorly, but that it would be better to see the actual data. As you might have guessed, my assumptions were totally incorrect. “Contact sales” ended up being the most resonant button copy.
That taught me an important lesson: put yourself in the shoes of the buyer. I imagined being a workforce analyst or administrator managing the schedules for thousands of employees. I wouldn’t be interested in testing a new tool on a whim. I would want to carefully research my options and build a relationship with a vendor who would get to know my circumstances. Through that lens, “Contact sales” resonates because it’s about taking that first step in relationship-building.
Q: How does Aspect's brand design stand out from other WEM companies?
It’s fun. For the people that use it, Aspect software is something they engage with every day, sometimes for hours. One way to be human-centered is to infuse the experience with fun and delight. A purely transactional software doesn’t reflect humanity and the way humans like to approach work. So, the brand shouldn’t either.
Our brand is made up of bright pinks and blues, quirky typography, modern icons, slick animations, and cheeky illustrations. All to reflect the idea that our brand isn’t just about software, but about the people who use it.
Q: How do customer needs inform the design process?
Every detail of Aspect’s design is meant to package information in the most beautiful and helpful way. And, we’re never done improving our design. We’re iterating on it constantly, responding to how people actually use it in order to make it more effective.
When we launched our ROI calculator last week, the calculator used “range sliders” to let website visitors quickly input their organization’s information like the size of their workforce or the average salary of employees. But, we got feedback that it was difficult to be precise with the sliders. And, visitors valued precision over speed. So, we converted the sliders into text inputs so visitors could enter in exact numbers.
"One way to be human-centered is to infuse the experience with fun and delight. A purely transactional software doesn’t reflect humanity and the way humans like to approach work. So, the brand shouldn’t either." - José Ocando
Q: What are the biggest challenges in creating a brand identity for B2B software?
In a word, personalization.
The challenge for a B2B brand is to meet customers where they’re at. From the early stages of discovery, in and through a long sales cycle that might be 6 months or more, all the way through to active customers who need help with user adoption. The brand needs to stretch and adapt to each phase.
At Aspect we use Webflow as our website development platform. Webflow offers a tool called Optimize that let’s us personalize the content on a page to suit the audience.
Is it the visitor’s first visit to the site? We might want to show them the article on our rebrand. The second? We might want to show them our article series on how to buy contact center software. The third? We might want to encourage them to visit our ROI calculator.
That personalization allows us give customers the most valuable resources for the stage they’re currently in.
Q: How do you balance data-driven, functional, and aesthetic design needs?
Form and function are often presented as opposing forces. But, I see them as complementary forces that both help to communicate an idea. If an idea is presented with function only, the audience is bored and uninspired. But, if an idea is presented with form only, the audience is left with confusion and a sense of shallowness.
The job of a designer is to make sure both forces are present and in balance. For example, if a piece of web copy is too long, people won’t want to read it. Function has become too dominant over form. In that case, a possible solution is to break up the text into more bite-size chunks instead of presenting it in one large wall of text.
With experience, designers build a library of strategies for helping form and function dance together in harmony.
Interested in more insights from the Aspect team? Check out more installments of the “Ask Aspect” series or explore “Spotlight On,” which highlights the experiences of exceptional team members across the business.
