Every product has a personality — whether it was designed that way or not. Reddit is quirky, hyper and sometimes sarcastic. Amazon is like a retailer with an eidetic memory and an amazing knack for statistics. And One Kings Lane evokes a sophisticated, well-dressed interior designer with a carefully curated unique library of stylish collages.
Personality is a mysterious force that attracts us to certain people and repels us from others.
Aaron Walter, Designing for Emotion
However, sometimes products have an unpredictable, moody personality, or they have several personalities at once.
Last year , when we at Weather Underground
Worked until May of this year, took stock of all of our products and pages before embarking on a design overhaul, we realized that our site was suffering from personality issues. For example, when we invited users to join and contribute to our community, we used excessive exclamation points (“Welcome! Join the conversation! Blog about the weather!”). When an error occurred, we provided users with very little information, at most a basic apology. (Our 404 page just said “An error occurred.”)
In summary, the Weather Underground website felt unpredictable, embarrassing, and in dire need of a social education lesson.
Weather Underground was the first weather site on the internet, so we wanted the new design to stay true to that history and even reinforce the “weather nerd” aspect of our personality. In addition, we also wanted to modernize the visual design and make the WU website more inviting, welcoming and friendly. At this point of designer tension, we realized that the Weather Underground product personality needed some definition,
the design persona helps to understand how the product can build a relationship with the users.
In this article, I’ll show how we came to the conclusion that it’s better to think of a product less as an “it” and more as a “someone” with a compelling yet consistent voice. Next, I will show how the designer persona became a permanent source of product ideas.
Party people
One of the most difficult aspects of creating a designer persona (and probably the most important) is thinking about the product less as just a collection of algorithms and more spain phone number data like a person. To get the right shift in thinking, I asked our designers to imagine a fictitious “persona party” with all of our user personas, our key content creators, and, of course, our design persona. Here is the challenge I submitted:
Imagine you’re WU, the essence
The Weather Underground, and you’re at a party. You see [one of our meteorologists] surrounded by a small group of enthusiastic listeners who nod sagely as he describes how a storm system is moving over Florida. Also what is brand equity and why is it important? involved in the discussion is a group of Personal Weather Station (PWS) owners who discuss the extreme values they have observed and recorded. In one corner, [our comedy videographer] is sipping something cg leads with a straw from a mason jar-like mug and telling jokes about the winter storm “Janus”. There’s also a bunch of Genius Photographers, eating all kinds of cheese dips, slapping each other’s shoulders.