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We're exploring ways to familiarize our users with our brand and one idea is to use the logo as the icon in a floating action button in our mobile application views.
I have heard in the past from UX and brand people that using your brand this way can dilute your brand and/or confuse your users.
Do folkx here think that using a company logo as an action button is harmful (or beneficial) to a brand?
Oftentimes this kind of push can come from a marketing dept that is under pressure to build awareness. The best brand awareness will come from successful experiences.
Mobile design is hard enough, considering the space constraints, and busy distracted users. You want to get them through their tasks to accomplish their goals as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
Consider the cognitive load you may place on your users, from the Neilsen Norman Group:
The total cognitive load, or amount of mental processing power needed to use your site, affects how easily users find content and complete tasks.
Every action where a user has to pause to understand its consequences is a tax on your customers' capacity, attention, and energy.
Material design has established the floating action button as a convention as follows:
A floating action button (FAB) represents the primary action of a screen.
Users develop a model about what a control (or a logo!) is supposed to do:
Build on existing mental models: People already have mental models about how websites work, based on their past experiences visiting other sites. When you use labels and layouts that they've encountered on other websites, you reduce the amount of learning they need to do on your site.
Ask the question: 'Is viewing our company logo and pausing to figure out why it's taking up valuable real estate (or what it might do) helping our users accomplish the goals our application is meant to help them achieve?'
The behavior of "clicking brand logo links to homepage" is well established. If you plan to hide action options under the logo it would cause confusion.
Since you have a hypothesis to test, I suggest you run a test asking what users would expect to happen when clicking the floating action button. Or, you could assign a task requiring the user use one of the actions hidden under the button and see how they react.
