Over at Wired, you can read all about the story behind Uber’s two-and-a-half year journey to develop a system of new icons , a new logo and a new identity system, how involved CEO Travis Kalanick was throughout the process, and how proud the team is of their work. But, honestly, I’m left scratching my head. Not because the design is confused, obtuse, or underwhelming. Put simply, Uber has managed to introduce confusion in what was a pretty straightforward system.

First the good. I like the new logo.

Uber's corporate logo

It feels more solid, is easier to read, and makes the company feel a little less unlikeable as a company. One can see how it could easily fit into an app icon on your phone, making it easier to find Uber when you need an Uber.

Thing is, I’ll never see the logo because I only see it when I launch the app on my phone.

Which I can’t do.

Because I can’t find it.

Uber's iPhone App icon

In their quest to make a brand statement, to establish a philosophical position for who they are, and why they exist, the Uber team have created an iconography system that few users will ever encounter in its entirety, myself included. From an iconic, brand-forward "U", to what has been described as everything from a bastardized power button to a wrench, the app icon which acts as the brand's primary gateway to users has been changed into a less-than-ideal element. The design, and the brand platform it's rooted in has to do with Uber seeing itself as a company that sits at the intersection of the digital and the physical. Or, to use their own words, "Bits and Atoms". The idea is that the combination of the two (e.g., digitally requesting a (physical) car) through technology is what Uber is all about. That's great for people who work at Uber. For the rest of us, Uber is a company that picks me up when I need to go from A to B.

Uber's "Bits and Atoms" Brand Video

As others have ranted many times before, design is only really design if it solves a problem...otherwise it’s just drawing. It might be pretty drawing, it might be a work of art worthy of display in a museum, but unless it’s solving an issue of some kind, unless it has a level of functional value beyond the aesthetic, it’s not really design. And, in the case of branding (aka, design for brands) that problem solving needs to focused on the brand’s key audience.

In Uber’s case, there are three legitimate audiences the company could be focusing on:

So, who did Uber focus on? Yeah, none of those.

It seems that the Uber team picked door number 4, which led to the executive suite. In his letter explaining the thinking behind the redesign, Travis Kalanick stated that “Almost two years ago (design director) Shalin Amin and I started a journey to refresh how Uber looked so it could better represent what we were going to become…(a company with) technology that moves cities and their citizens.”

It’s terrific that Uber has a clarity of its own purpose, its reason for being. Not every company can make that claim. But, as a user, as an individual who has bought into the brand since 2010, I can’t help but think that this is a brand that is serving its own purposes ahead of my own. Does Uber have grandiose ambitions and plans for its future? Sure. But in the mean time, it still left me standing in Terminal 1 at SFO trying to figure out how I was going to get home?

Somewhere along the way, in their quest to make the sketches and options on the wall feel harmonious and beautiful, everyone in the room forgot who they were designing for. The user, be it the rider or the driver, simply stopped mattering. Maybe in the beginning the quest was to fix things for people outside of Uber, but by the end it was about creating a stage upon which the company could celebrate itself.

Sadly, Uber is not alone. As more and more companies move to bring their brand and design thinking in-house, more and more of them are making decisions that fail to address the real needs of their users. They may make things pretty when they need it to be pragmatic. They may create elaborate animations when users just need to jump right into the service. They try to be funny when they ought to explain why they matter. Or, they may create a system that tells a story that only they can understand.

When this happens, as we’ve seen with Uber, the brand goes from being a solver of problems, to being a creator of them.

Now then, anybody know when the next bus is coming?

Uber's Brand Redesign: Or why I’m going to have to take the bus