How to Give Your Product Personality

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.

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.

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!

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.)