Who Is The Product?
Another simple tool to help calibrate a project team, or elicit interesting information from a consumer: personification.
It couldn’t be more simple. Just ask something like: if this product were a famous actor, who would it be? Pick a product and ask a few people–I guarantee you’ll get interesting responses. I’ve heard answers like, “It’s Harrison Ford: completely reliable, rugged, maybe a little beat up, but a solid performer.” Or, “It’s Keanau Reeves–looks great but maybe not such a great performer.” Occasionally, something like, “Actor? It’s like my neighbor. Completely unreliable.”
It all goes back to my pet theory that people relate to product best if they can relate to them like people. We’re tuned to relate to people, through evolution and socialization. We think about products in terms of people all the time: we apply standard conversational rules to user interface interactions, and we “recognize” human features in inanimate objects.
So when we think at a higher level–what is a product like?–it’s natural that we’d be good at thinking in human terms. Picking a larger-than-life personality as an illustration of how we feel about a product or a company is a quick, easy way to get into substantive discussions about what that product means. That, in turn, is good input to a design process.
Question for you: Who is your product?
[hat photo by mag3737]
I’ve been using your suggestion of personification to help me think of a name for a new product, and it has been quite helpful. It’s also given me some ideas for the marketing strategy. It seems that it would be especially useful for products that are very innovative, that need a lot of explaining as to how they work and what benefits they provide.
Hi EZ,
I’m glad it’s working for you. I agree that this kind of metaphor is useful for new products that might need some extra explanation - but I’ve also used it successfully when considering “old” product categories that everyone already thinks they understand completely. In those cases, it’s hard for companies to break out of the pack; thinking about what the product would be like if it were more like [name a celebrity here] is a useful way to get the designers thinking about new ways to approach the problem.
A