Identity
For branding to work, your identity also has to be rock solid. Wikipedia tells us about identity: "In marketing, a corporate identity is the 'persona' of a corporation ... It is usually visibly manifested by way of branding and the use of trademarks.".

So marks of your trade, your logo. But your brand is much more than a logo only. It is also your clutter free website, the tone of your copy writing, the relation you maintain with your public. Online and offline. How fast do you respond to users that file bug or feature reports? Or when you are dealing with clients face to face, how your office smells and the way you answer the phone.

An identity also includes a good name. A good name is a valuable asset and often underestimated.
A good name needs to be short, simple, unique, speakable and shocking. My rule is: freaky and funky names stick in the mind of the user. This creates an emotional response. Don't use common names. Good names are; Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Twitter, Google and Alertthingy.

In another article I wrote on making the transition from web to desktop, I also talk about the importance of a good and well designed icon in conjunction with a good name.

Bad names, or common names, are hard to remember, too generic and hard to spell. There is a great article by Guy Kawasaki called 'The Name Game' about choosing names for your brand, product or company. The name of your app is something users will remember, I truly recommend this article. Users will share experiences based on you brand- or product name, try to Google it, and use it as a verb. Coming up with a good name doesn't have to be that hard, but it is a crucial step.

There are a few things to take in consideration before releasing your application. I talked about how to create a real brand and trust and choose a name. Now lets talk about your application itself.

Wax on, wax off. Make it shine.
If you want your application to be a success make sure it does not look like something a developer designed. Seriously, worry about what you are good at. It is so easy to forget how important things like color, fonts and a good layout are.

My design skills are really bad, to say the least. The best thing to do is hire a designer to (re-)design you app. Tell him/her everything you want and how you want it. If he/she is a good designer, he/she'll come up with good ideas on the interaction side of things as well. Another plus is that they do this for a living, they already know this. That way you can spend more time on the programmatic design and the overall architecture and take that one step further.

Besides a polished application, the website that hosts your app also needs to look good, because this is what people see when they come to you. This is what builds up part of the trust with the user.

There are a couple of options:
- A separate domain. The best is to have one uniform style as the application
- A special page dedicated to your app on your own server, seperate from the rest of the normal content.
- As a download in a blog post.

Version 1.0 rc1
So your version 1 just rolled off the workbench; it’s ready to distribute.
You probably already have ideas about new features and improvements for upcoming versions. Before you do any of this, make sure your first release has the ability to update itself and makes use of one of the updater frameworks out there. If it doesn't, how the hell are people getting the next version of your fantastic AIR app? Don't expect users to update their own software. If you've ever had a job in a call centre doing IT support, you know EXACTLY what I mean :).

Before you release your 1.0 let somebody who has never seen it look at it, play with it and wreck it, let them be ruthless! Your mother, neighbor, girl friend / boyfriend, co-workers, the office manager, managers etc. I highly recommend this step. Rethinking, re-sketching, starting completely over on a design is not uncommon before you get it right. It also lets you create better products and refine the process. If your test group can't work with it, do it again is my philosophy. The users experience is one of the biggest pillars of your application. If they can't work with it, its not a success.

If you are commercially developing AIR apps or you find your software used by lots and lots of users then consider this: you are not making this for yourself, but for them, they need to love it, it needs to be effective, yet astoundingly simple, so everybody can use it on a daily base. The bigger the group who can use it, the bigger the adoption of it.

When you look at applications like Klok or Alertthingy, you see that they have a familiar interface, elements we see in other pieces of software as well, we have grown accustomed to. That makes it easy to use. (I will not say intuitive, because there is nothing instinctive about it. There is nothing intuitive about a computer mouse to somebody who has never seen one. But when you play with it, it becomes familiar.
The late Jef Raskin once said that when we say ‘intuitive’ in the context of software we actually mean familiar. And I completely agree with him.

In the last part of this series I'll talk on using the correct channels to get your application out there to make it a success. Stay tuned!

Branding 101 for Developers - Part 1 of 4
Branding 101 for Developers - Part 2 of 4

Read more from Sidney de Koning.