The Childish Washer & The Happy Website: The Power of Product Personality

Everything around us has a personality, at least that's the way people perceive things around them. The moment we see other people or animals for the first time we will automatically attribute personality traits to them. But we also attribute personality traits to products around us. We can see a car and find it friendly, funny and provocative or think of it as serious and caring. The same goes for every product you can imagine, ranging from washers to websites. And even though product designers have been aware of this fact for a long time (and designed the products accordingly), web designers haven't thought about it.

On the web we've been looking so much at making things usable that we've forget to design a personality into our products. And it's exactly that personality that will make websites engage with it's users on the right level. So in this talk I would like to explain what product personality is all about, where it comes from, how it helps design better products (and experiences) and especially how UX designers can design for it.