We are excited to officially announce and debut our new Clarity app icon which will represent the Clarity brand identity throughout our external facing content, social media channels and on our web pages.
I recently sat down with a few members of our design team who were instrumental in the overall project from ideation to implementation to learn a bit about the design process and overall concept behind our new Clarity app icon.
App Icon vs Brand Logo
To clarify, no pun intended, we created a Clarity app icon and not a logo. What is the difference you might ask? Instead of organizing our offerings according to which team built them, we organize according to our customers: how they experience our offerings, how they see the world, and what they need. We have one logo or brand- Microsoft, which leads to everything we do. In turn, products, apps or experiences are individual offerings that customers may purchase and use—like Clarity, therefore we came up with an app icon versus a brand logo. We created our app icon taking into consideration these main ideas: keep it simple, make it personal, think universal, create delight and details matter.
How Our Icon Came About
In following traditional branding process, our design team used our Clarity value proposition, Clarity is a behavioral analytics tool that helps you see what your web visitors want. Clarity provides heatmaps, recordings, insights and is a complement to Google Analytics, to come up with a brand identity. The team started with creative aspects from the website and words to develop a Clarity “brand identity” which was then aligned to a visual representation as you will learn about below.
Here’s what was developed and used as inspiration for our app icon:
Clarity provides precision, direction and momentum to our customers to help them understand their end-user behaviors.
The team looked at each of the three ideas behind the product more closely in developing the app icon:
Precision: Clarity captures how real people actually use your website and the points at which they drop
Direction: Clarity provides clear direction on how to improve the user experience of your website by providing heatmaps, session recordings and data of engagement.
Momentum: Clarity is easy to setup and provides data in minutes.
From these three themes, the design process began and a visual representation was created.
Learn how users interact with your site through Clarity!
Use our heatmaps, recordings and insights to keep them coming back!
Design Fundamentals
The next step was to build the actual design for the Clarity app icon. Design came up with three different directions:
1. An abstract/metaphor example
2. One that closely represented text and alphabet
3. A design that mirrors the brand name.
The team then had to decide what direction would work best.
Our App Icon Significance
Clarity literally means the quality and state of being clear. The triangle shape can help forge clearer emotions and psychological connections between our brand and our users. It communicates precision and reliability with equal sides and symmetry. When this project began, a lot of the discussion centered around how to best represent Clarity as it begins to grow and how we can best represent the product within our existing and future partnerships, integrations and consumer facing channels. There were many different iterations and direction from letter shapes to abstract shapes, and ultimately after discussing with the product team, the abstract idea was the best representation of the product. As a part of the Microsoft ecosystem, we wanted our app icon to have the same visual alignment as the rest of the product families.
Outcomes & Learnings
Talking with the designers, it was interesting to hear that the most exciting part of the process was also the most challenging. Getting the idea behind the metaphor across and getting a consensus decision from the product team. After a lot of quality back and forth with the product team, they landed on a design that all the team was happy with and excited about. They mentioned that overall this project was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work but it was cool to see it come to life.
With the new Clarity app icon, the product now has a face to its name and will allow for greater visibility and growth across the product and customer facing channels. You will soon start to see the Clarity app icon displayed across our site and throughout our various social media channels and we hope you enjoy!