Designing Interfaces with character
The Interface persona
Hi, my name is Gus (do pronounce it goose, please)and I am a Product designer. My Bachelor’s degree was in Animation and Digital Art, and I have a Masters of Fine Arts, with a focus on Visual Narrative. So I am often focused on how to create products with the main principles for character development. I am convinced that every time you act with a digital product it must feel like you are interacting with a character. This background has helped me before to create more consistent user personas.
So whenever I have a new project on my hands, I try to understand (and this will sound bizarre) Who will this interface be? I am getting into the habit of making an “Interface persona”. If this product were a character, how would they be? Would they be gleeful, eager to invite you to play a game? or would they be serious and formal, trustful and confident to help you pay your taxes? Would they be helpful and have a ready smile, offer you to get the best tickets for you at a venue?
This might sound strange, to bestow personality upon a series of screens, after all I am not only asking you to do that, but I am also telling you that it is helpful to try to meet them! Why? Because once you associate your product with a character, then a number of questions become easier to answer: the kind of language they speak, the kind of words they use, will they speak in third or first person? By the way, there is an excellent piece on this matter by John Saito, right here.
Humans are visceral. We make quick judgements about the things we see, and we are social creatures, which means we are always assessing if whatever we are interacting with is or not dangerous, and then we evaluate if it is going to be useful for our goal or not. Which is why stores train their workers to look a certain way, to talk with a certain lexicon. Because employees are tasked to carry the voice of the company with the people, so thinking about your UI as an employee, a character who has to have the voice and attitude of a certain company, can be a great conceptual tool for you to use. We’ve gotten really good at it and we usually make this judgement in a split second. Sometimes I imagine a user searching an app in the store and just dismissing it, as a caveman would dismiss the incorrect cherry.
It gets easier with some practice, but I find it extremely helpful to imagine your user interface like it is a character. Try to find how they talk, who is they talking to, what is the message you are trying to get. After all, by designing an interface it is like you are training a member of the team, and an important one! Since this is the team member who’s going to mediate between what you offer, and the user.
Thank you so much for reading! if you are curious about the screens I used to illustrate my point, they are templates I found in Mockitt. It is a great platform to do Wireframing, I find it quite useful since there is even a window right at the start where you can find components made by the design languages most often used, Material Design and IOS:
Also it has great templates that I used because of its convenience. If you are interested on downloading and using Mockitt, they have an online version and one that you can download.
Thanks again for reading, remember we humans think of stories, and remember stories better than we remember anything else. Give it a shot!
