We spent quite a bit of time in 2010 trying to sum up in a phrase our approach. We decided on useful beauty. What does that mean? Well, let me try to explain:
Is it useful? What’s it for?
If we say that we spend a lot of time pondering questions like those, we wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. It’s not – really it’s not – that we’re consumed by some kind of existential angst. It’s just that we want to do a good job and, in our eyes, that means going to great lengths to make sure the things we do are as useful as we can possibly make them.
Those are qualities we apply to what has been called ‘digital marketing’. Often the result is a website; sometimes it’s an email campaign; or an app for your phone or the mobilisation of social media like Facebook and Twitter. These are not objects that people readily call ‘useful’. And they’re not, in themselves. They have to be turned into something useful to meet specific needs and commercial objectives.
The truth is, you need to imagine them in a different way. You need to question closely how they are used and then change the nature of the experience felt by the user. Only then does the website become truly useful. In fact we believe it becomes not just useful but beautiful. It achieves that beauty by supreme ease of use created by design.
Useful beauty is an unusual combination. You don’t actually see a lot of it around. Too many things are useful but ugly – we have hopes for litter bins but we know there’s a way to go before they become objects of beauty. Equally we see lots of things that are beautiful but, with the best will in the world, you could live a useful life without layers of glittering jewellery.
But there are examples out there if you look hard enough. Here are some of the things we love for their useful beauty: Oslo Airport; a Mont Blanc pens; a Swiss Army knife; a Dewey Weber performer surfboard; an Anglepoise lamp.
All of these objects were volunteered instantly by people at 3Sixty. Actually they didn’t say ‘a’ or ‘an’ they said ‘my’ – as in my Le Creuset pots, my Gaggia coffee machine, my iPhone. People start getting emotional and personal about objects of useful beauty.
People love these objects because they love using them. They are easy to use and there is a pleasure in using them. The designers and manufacturers have used more than just technical skills to make them work. They’ve used intellectual curiosity to think through every aspect of its use. They’ve used creative ingenuity to anticipate and solve problems. They’ve stripped away the superfluous to discover what is really essential. With all these examples, we recognise that there’s an inherent beauty in the object’s visual appearance – its shape, lines, colour, texture, material. But we also know that this beauty comes too from its absolute fitness for purpose. That’s what makes it an object of useful beauty.
Of course, these are all objects you can hold in your hand, or at least touch. We all feel it’s easier to understand those parts of the world that we reach out and touch, and we learn to do that from an early age. It’s harder, though, to run an admiring hand over a website. But the truth is, the world has changed, and these days we can do so much more online. Think of Google, think of the way they thought through what we really need from an internet search engine – and they gave us something that we all use with the greatest ease. Beautiful. Useful.
So this is what we do with every project we undertake for the businesses that we work with. The result may be a website and it may be that you can’t hold that website in your hand. But we can put the experience of using it at your fingertips – and, because we’ve really interrogated the user experience, because we’ve truly thought through the commercial potential, we can make that website do more for you than you had ever imagined. Not so very different from a Swiss Army knife after all.