How to Give Your Product Personality | Hacker News Reader

How to Give Your Product Personality

jasonshen.com

131 pointsjasonshen30 comments

A lot of the examples in this article are kind of gimmicky. MailChimp, for example. You would be better off ignoring the chimp, who usually links to YouTube time-wasters as if they were important messages (the chimp is usually the "visually loudest" item on the page). Personality? Yes. But maybe not a good inspiration for your own product's personality. Maybe too much trading-off of utility.

To me, the web product that had the best personality of any is Feedburner. Kind of funny, creative, and slightly self-deprecating in consistent ways (e.g.: "troubleshootize" offsets the selling-out nature of "monetize"). The same clever, helpful, friendly voice is present on every page without getting in your way. The jokes are still actually, clearly communicating content. A tremendous achievement, IMO, and I believe it has kept me loyal despite their Google acquisition.

Groupon's email "personality" has attracted a lot of praise, but it’s polarizing, and I cannot stand it.

Another positive example is Pandora. The interactive, conversational tone encountered when setting up a station -- this was back in, what, 2005 -- has been a personal inspiration to me.

A counter-example is Stack Overflow, IMO. All the "site" messaging feels off to me. I’m always unceremoniously and orange-ly invited to "Read the FAQ." Told I can do something, and then prevented from doing so for having violated a secret policy, with a note that puts the blame on me ("Oops, edits need to be 6 characters or greater!"). Told I have "been logged in" and that I should click to refresh the page. It’s a personality, but it’s not a friendly one. It’s a red-tape-with-a-technical-explanation-from-a-lazy-programmer-with-no-UX-concept personality. An anti-pattern in site personality.

Be like Feedburner!

Gimmicks are in the eye of the beholder. A lot of very standard business practices started as "gimmicks" including free phone support and being open on Sundays.

I think real gimmicks are things that trick you into doing something you didn't really want to do. I don't think any of the examples I listed were of that nature.

Check out Seth Godin's post on gimmicks: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/gimmicks.htm...

My broader point is that some of these examples aren’t of a personality being present throughout a product, so much as one isolated instance: A 404 page, an omnipresent chimp.

Less that gimmicks, as I used the term, are bad so much as they are insufficient.

Admittedly, showing pervasive personality is harder to do in a format such as your blog post.

(And it’s quibble-y and dead-horse-beating of me, but the MailChimp mascot has tricked me into clicking links I did not really want or need to click.)

I have to respectfully disagree with your point re: Mailchimp. They are a company that makes it easier to make email newsletters. Nothing knock your socks off amazing there. But that chimp and the subsequent marketing around it has played a major role in customer loyalty. They recently hit 1M customers and, to celebrate, they gave away plushies, hats, and t-shirts all with the mailchimp theme. And they gave them away quickly. Really says something about customer love and loyalty imo.

http://blog.mailchimp.com/one-meeeellion-users/

Also, they do give you the "non-cheeky" option, so there's that.

Completely agree re: Feedburner. :)

I wasn’t aware that I could de-chimpify. Thanks, I’ll look for that.

And I don’t mean to knock the entire MailChimp brand or UX or mascot, so much as that one most visible aspect.

Customer love? You can't be serious! The only thing it really says is that people love freebies.

I was so happy to see that my dogs stayed on the pricing page after the recent redesign of isocket, thanks for featuring them! Strangely enough, it's probably one of the more popular things I've ever designed. Using humor in your marketing pages is a great way to cut through the corporate clutter.

Here's a pic of two of them (the chihuahua and pug) to prove that they're real:

http://cl.ly/1t053y1m0Z010C2l0J16

This is definitely something that is missing from the startup ecosystem - tips on giving your product personality. All the great companies seem to have a personality.

Surprise is a really good point and something that we can generally apply.

But I am not a fan of the theme/brand point. Lots of people say it, and it seems easy to say once a company is successful - but hard to figure it out when you are in the early stages.

Hey Vineet, I agree that figuring it out early on is hard, but it's not just something successful companies "say" they did.

You as the product creator have to make decisions about what your product means, what it stands for and how it will come across. Imagine your product was a real person - how would they behave? What would they say? Those are the kinds of things you'll then need to build into the product.

No one said it'd be easy, but I think it's worth it.

Jason, I actually agree.

I did not mean to say that I don't like doing it - just that I have heard it so many times and that making it happen is hard. I would love to hear more people breaking this branding thing down.

Sure. It's a complex and fuzzy process, which is probably why it hasn't been explained well. It starts with you & your customer.

I see that you're behind architexa and I can see you're not sure what kind of personality you want for your product. Why did you decide to make this? Is this a personal problem you have? Who is your target customer? Why do they want your product? Do they want to work faster? Or prevent mistakes? Or use something with very little friction? And don't say all of the above, because no product can be all things to all people, just like no person can be likeable to everyone (well, except Ryan Hupfer).

Answering those questions starts you down the road of developing your product's personality. Also check out 37 Signals's article on finding an enemy - http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Have_an_Enemy.php

I would say that your (perceived) personality IS your brand - your brand being the identity that your users see in you.

If by brand you meant your logo, consider that your theme and your logo will be for sure noticed by your users/visitors and what they communicate will be taken as part as your brand and personality.

Hey, if we can add personality to the ad industry then anyone can do it. I personally think that a lot of people devalue what helping people have a little more fun can add to a product and many are scared that fun/personable = unprofessional, which isn't the case.

I think another awesome example of a product having some personality is HipChat -- they're all over. They're a goofy and fun group of guys and they have built a product that reflects that.

All you need to do is look at either their Easter egg emoticons (http://www.quora.com/What-are-all-of-the-hidden-emoticons-on...) or the billboard that they had on 101 (http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/22/y-u-no-have-lame-billboard-...) and you can tell that they have personality literally oozing out of their product. Yeah, I said "oozing".

So true. Hipchat has been great about adding quirky little bits to their product. You might not like their Y U NO billboard but it's definitely got personality.

An example of a product that has great personality that I personally love using is WuFoo

Yeah, in the blog post Jason added the example of our thank-you cards, but I personally think the actual product design is even more important. Kevin gives some examples in his "Designing Web Apps Users Love" presentation:

http://www.siliconprairienews.com/2011/09/sunday-video-wufoo...

Edit: Also, thank you! It's always nice to hear feedback from people who use Wufoo.

Totally agree. Wufoo has so much personality it would take an entire series to write about them and I didn't think it'd be fair to the other websites. =)

I have just disassembled a piece of furniture, so I might be a bit biased, but what went through my head is "my screwdriver does not need personality". I don't even care if the screwdriver is rather boring.

Probably it is true for some products, but I think if you offer a great service or tool, people won't shun it just because it is boring. For example the tax industry is huge (in Germany anyway), software companies selling tax accounting software rake in the money. I don't think little artificial pets would help with their products.

Personally, I can see value in tax-management software having a personality. People might really appreciate that if it made the task less onerous, as long as it was done in a way that didn't interfere or give you the feeling it didn't know what it was doing. Couldn't that be a big differentiator?

Clippy?

"Done in a way that doesn't interfere." :) Good point, though. I was thinking more along the lines of wording of dialogue and descriptions.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, there are lots of examples here : http://littlebigdetails.com/

Great read.

A shortcut to injecting personality touched on but not highlighted in your article is building around a spokesperson.

These come in three flavors:

Anthropomorphic mascot that doesn't age, doesn't go on benders in Vegas, doesn't get divorced, etc:

-= GEICO Gecko

-= Aflac Duck

-= Reddit Alien and follow-up of HipMunk.

-= Mickey Mouse

Or your "over the top" fictional people:

-= Old Spice guy

-= The Most Interesting Man in the World, etc.

-= Betty Crocker

And the grand finale if you can't pull it off, the founder as hero / personality

-= Steve Jobs

-= Dave from Wendy's

-= Larry Ellison

Great point. Spokespeople / mascots are great. I think Alexis Ohanian is adamant about how having a mascot was a big part of what made Reddit succeed in growing and building a cult (and now massive) following.

Indeed! :) breadpig.com too. I've given a couple classes on Making Something People Love that hits on a lot of these. So happy to see more people talking about building brands with personality.

Great article. It think you nailed them, I especially like the "Surprise" item as this is often cited in game design as an element of fun.

Always wondered how to bring personality and voice to a product. The examples cited make it really simple to understand.

GitHub has a better 404 page

https://github.com/404

Big fan of the github 404 page. The Star Wars theme seems perfect for their target market and I love the movement

I like this article, but it seems mostly geared towards social or web products. It'd be really interesting to discuss giving less "charismatic" types of products personality such as software for data integration or other enterprise services....

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