Aarron writes:

Personality can manifest itself in an interface through visual design, copy, and interactions. A design persona describes how to channel personality in each of these areas and helps the web team to construct a unified and consistent result. The goal is to construct a personality portrait every bit as clear as those Justin Long and John Hodgman convey in the “Get a Mac” ads.

Here is my design persona for Hotpot, based on the template provided by Aarron:

Overview

Hotpot is like your energetic, gregarious best friend who wants to introduce you to all these great people she met while traveling.

She’s lighthearted, friendly and upbeat, yet down-to-earth, practical and dependable when you need her to be. You can always count on her for something fun to do on a Saturday afternoon. She’s great at organizing get-togethers. In fact, she’s usually the one who initiates them.

Brand Traits

SPUNKY but not childish

WARM but not sentimental

OPTIMISTIC but not unrealistic

ENTHUSIASTIC but not pushy

POLITE but not distant

DOWN-TO-EARTH but not boring

ADVENTUROUS but not reckless

KNOWLEDGEABLE but not didactic

DEPENDABLE but not perfectionistic

Voice

The voice of Hotpot is positive, casual and inviting. Ideally, it’s like a good party host, who instantly puts you at ease when you enter the crowded room. It’s good at introducing you to people, creating a sense of what you all have in common, and putting everyone in a good mood.

The language style could be described as “classy vernacular,” with some light humor thrown in. However humor should be used sparingly, and always gracefully. Popular idioms can be used, but take care to avoid sounding cheesy or trite. The language should not have any trace of pretension or snobbery, even when addressing sophisticated food topics. It should also never “talk down” but rather respect the interests and backgrounds of all it encounters. It should aim to be positive and helpful at all times.

Copy Examples

In App Greeting
Wonderful to see you, tinabeans!

Success Feedback
Success! Your invite is speeding towards its destination.

Thank You
Thanks for the submission. We couldn’t do it without you!

Error Feedback
Don’t forget to enter your zip code.

Solicitation
We want to know what you think! Please be as honest and detailed as you can.

Critical Failure
Oof, how embarrassing! The server has a bad case of the hiccups. The Hiccup Squad has been alerted. Meanwhile, please wait a bit and refresh this page. Thanks for being so patient.

Marketing Copy
We’ve got a lot of exciting things planned for you in the coming months. Our favorite upcoming feature is the ability to map your friends. We love how this allows us to see where our friends are from, as well as to truly understand that distance is no obstacle when it comes to a great meal cooked together.

Visual Lexicon

Color

Hotpot uses colors that are found in a clean, modern kitchen owned by a creative, fun-loving cook. A background of soft natural colors is punctuated with sparks of coordinated bright hues. The natural colors should be reminiscent of familiar kitchen surfaces and textures: handsome wood, cool granite, smooth tile, though not necessarily literally represented as such. The livelier accent colors might recall favorite contemporary cooking tools, like a silicon spatula with a bright plastic handle, or a colorful dishcloth.

Typography

The body type should be set in an open, friendly and readable sans-serif with a large x-height. It should maintain some humanist quirks and not be too clean or geometric. It should feel accessible and unpretentious, not overtly decorative or expressive. This should be complemented with a more expressive display font for headings, but again it shouldn’t be too showy. A contemporary serif or toned-down script might work.

General Style Notes

Use kitchen conceits very sparingly (like checkered patterns, doily edges, real-life textures, ribbon trim, etc.) A little might be needed to create a sense of warmth and coziness, but not too over-the-top. Something halfway between Culinary Culture and Punchfork would be ideal. Try to keep it gender-neutral.

Friday, 6:30 PM

Vera drops her bag on the couch. Another long day at work.

She simultaneously opens her fridge and her kitchen laptop in one practiced motion. Time to crawl the recipe sites for the next great adventure in dinner for one. As she expertly switches her gaze between glowing screen and glowing fridge interior, she notices she has one unread email. Vera, who prides herself on her impeccable adherence to Inbox Zero, lets the fridge door swing shut with a resigned sigh.

It’s a message from her co-worker, Fred. The subject line reads “You’re invited to cook with me on HotPot!”

Her brow furrows. How did Fred get my personal email address? And why is he sending me spam?

She clicks into the email nonetheless. Fred is harmless enough. He would never send her spam without a good reason.

You’ve been invited to cook with me on HotPot!, reads the computer-generated message. The recipe I’ve chosen is Winter Mushroom Ragout. Location: your kitchen. Time and date…

As she reads, she starts to laugh. Is this for real? Fred is asking me out on an internet date… to cook!

Okay… okay, Vera thinks to herself, why not? Cooking alone can be a drag day after day… There’s only so much joy one can get out of really nice plating if I am the only one seeing it. And Fred is a nice guy. Poor Fred though. Too scared to ask a girl out on a real date… hah!

Vera clicks “Accept” in the email. She immediately gets a confirmation message that contains a link to a virtual HotPot “room,” as well as instructions to access that room at the appointed cooking time. She makes a note on her calendar for next Wednesday—the scheduled date of the invite—and jots down the ingredients for Mushroom Ragout. She’ll get the stuff this weekend when she goes grocery shopping…

Wednesday, 7:00 PM

Vera has just finished arranging her kitchen counter with all the ingredients for Mushroom Ragout. She pulls up her confirmation message from last week and clicks the link. A browser window pops up.

When the page finishes loading, she sees a dialogue asking her to fill out her name and password or sign in. Since this is first time, Vera fills out the short form to sign up and clicks “okay.”

Next, the page requests camera access and asks her to check her hair. Vera complies, then clicks next.

Finally, she enters the “room.” sees a screen with a list of ingredients, an overview of the Mushroom Ragout recipe, and a message saying “waiting for Fred.” A few moments later, the sound of a bell plays and Fred’s video pops up on the screen!

“Hi Vera,” says Fred, a shy smile on his face. ”I heard you liked to cook, so I thought this would be kind of fun. I saw my sister write about this on her food blog, so I thought I’d give it a try,” he quickly explains.

Vera smiles back. “Wow, this is actually very nice. Thank you for inviting me. Let’s see… so we’re looking at each other’s kitchens?”

Vera and Fred proceed to give each other the grand tour of their own home kitchens. Vera is a bit impressed by how well-decorated his place looks. And those gorgeous copper pots on the walls… unexpected!

Once they’re done, they put their laptops back on the counters. Fred asks “Are you ready to start cooking? This is my first time making ragout, so I hope you can show me the ropes.”

Vera laughs, “I don’t know how much of an expert I am, but I’ll do my best!”

They both click “start” and the first step pops up on their screens.

As they begin chopping and prepping, Vera and Fred converse about everything from work shenanigans to their families. Occasionally, Fred asks Vera about her knife technique. She’s delighted to have a chance to show off her skill (not to mention the 9″ Wüsthof chef’s knife she got herself last year with her holiday bonus).

When it comes time to go on to the next step, Vera asks Fred if he’s ready. Fred says go ahead, and Vera clicks to the next step. She can see Fred’s icon follow hers on the recipe timeline.

“I see you’re following me around,” Vera jokes.

“Of course I am,” Fred replies. Then he turns his head to the side in a funny way. Was there a blush? The lighting in his kitchen was just a little too orange to tell…

The next step is to sautée the onions for 3 minutes. Vera melts a pat of butter in her prized French oven and puts the onions when it’s nice and hot. She is instantly greeted with the densely aromatic smell of onions frying. She gives it a little stir, and can tell from the sizzle on Fred’s end that he’s also put in his onions. She goes back to the laptop to check up on the recipe and notices a little note underneath the current recipe step:

When you toss the onions in the pan, you should be greeted with a sizzle and a wonderful aroma. Can you capture that scent in words?

There’s a little space below to type in an answer. Vera thinks a bit to herself. She’s never been great with food adjectives, and always believed that was best left to the critics and wine snobs. Then she sees a few words appearing on her screen. Looks like Fred is going for it!

Sweet, pungent and toasty. Reminds me a lot of the open air street food markets in India where I was last summer.

Vera smiles. What a lovely way of putting it! She adds her bit:

I used butter, which really releases its aroma and mingles with the onion. My mother’s kitchen always smelled like this in the winter, which let me know a good stew was on its way.

When the 3 minutes are up, Vera is alerted by a ding from her laptop. She snaps out of her nostalgic reverie to run back to the stove. She gives the onions a final toss when she hears Fed says, “Oops I’d better go check up on my onions, or they’ll burn!”

“Don’t think of it as burning, think of it as caramelizing the edges,” Vera quips. “Also, you must tell me about your trip to India! I’ve been dying to go.”

For the next hour and a half, Vera and Fred work their way through the recipe together. When there are periods of waiting or simmering, the are prompted to trade stories and tasting notes via their keyboards. At certain points in the recipe (such as after the herbs have been added), the page also reminds them to taste and savor the dish-in-progress. Vera has never cooked so slowly and so conscientiously before. After all, she was a skilled and well-rehearsed cook: once the stove was on, it was a swift dance of ingredients and utensils to get the food on the plate. And she hardly ever tastes anymore because she’s so confident in her skill. But here she was, being prompted to eat the onions after they’ve been caramelized! She finds it’s a very pleasant change of pace. Though the recipe would have taken her half as long when she’s cooking alone, she doesn’t seem to mind. Especially not when there’s companionship to fill in the gaps of waiting.

When the ragout is almost done, Vera lifts the lid off her pot and inhales deeply. “This smells gorgeous!” she exclaims.

Fred agrees, “Mine came out really good as well. Too bad we don’t have smell-o-vision yet!”

They both click “Finish” on the last step of the recipe, and the screen changes to give the video chat more space. The recipe goes away and is replaced with a text field marked “Tasting Notes.”

“I can’t wait to eat this. I’m so hungry,” says Fred. “Would you like to eat together?”

“Of course! This looks perfect. Let me just relocate you to the dining table.”

“Take it easy, I’m heavy.” Fred jokes.

“Nonsense,” Vera chuckles.

They ladle some mushroom ragout into bowls and sit down at their respective tables with their laptops. Vera pours herself a glass of burgandy and raises it to the screen. From his end, Fred raises a bottle of stout.

“Cheers!”

And with that, they take their first bites together.

A character study is not the same thing as a persona. Personas exist to help us envision an entire demographic at a time, and the end result is often a rather bland portrait of Pure Averageness. This is a pleasant exercise and convenient for the designer, but the end result is wholly uninteresting, and worse, unrealistic. We create personas because they are supposed to give us an actual human being to empathize with while designing. But how many human beings do you know that have perfect teeth/skin/hair and only wear one type of clothing all the time? Personas are the iStockphoto of imagined people.

A character, on the other hand, is far more like a human being: idiosyncratic, unpredictable and contradictory. They can only be understood as individual accidents of nature/nurture, not as constructed, idealized stand-ins for an aggregate. This helps us get out of the mindset of Perfect Design Land into Messy Real Life Land. It might even help us understand & anticipate some surprising (mis)uses of a designer’s intent.

So here’s my first stab at a character study:

***

Vera Applebottom is thirty-one years old and lives in Orange County. She works for a pharmaceutical firm as director of HR, hiring and firing people and listening to them complain about their jobs in between. She used to be an elementary school English teacher. Now she earns twice as much, but it’s debatable whether or not this was an improvement.

In fact, going to graduate school to study management might be her biggest life regret. She used to wear socks with pumpkins on them for Halloween, to match her witch hat. She liked spending time with children, especially liked being one of the “fun teachers” that all the other teachers’ kids wished they had for homeroom. Now she wears white socks and no hat indoors, all days of the year.

Her most prized possession is a pair of antique pruning shears given to her by her late aunt. Her aunt was the only person who empathized with the fact that she had any regrets in life. Everyone else, especially her two sisters (both housewives), admired her independence and ability to generate income. Her mother, especially, liked to brag that her daughter was a modern woman with a mind and job of her own. Forget that, at her eldest sister’s wedding last year, Vera was so jealous she wanted to grab the limo from the driver and use it to run over the groom. Or at least a bridesmaid or two.

She consoles herself with cooking every night. Domestic, feminine joys seemed beyond her reach for the most part, but she could make fabulously, unnecessarily sophisticated one-person meals for herself in her two-bedroom condo while watching Family Guy. She wonders if/when she gets married, whether the man would be okay with the fact that she delighted in crude humor. She wonders if she would actually marry someone as obese and… unpolished as Peter Griffin. She’d love him though, she’s sure of it. She just couldn’t tell anyone this, ever.

It’s too bad, because poor rotund Fred from the clinical trials division was madly in love with Vera, and though everyone else at work knew she’d reciprocate in an instant, they enjoyed watching the small awkward dramas between them far too much to clue either of them in.

***

Well, that was fun. (Now I know not to quit my job and take up creative writing.) Writing non-stock characters is MAD HARD, and I’m not sure how much I’ve succeeded. I do know I really like Vera though, and wouldn’t mind spending more time with her. Maybe, if I’m patient enough, she’ll tell me exactly what she needs my thesis to do for her? That would be a start.

In hindsight, I’m glad I’m doing this exercise now, rather than at the beginning. I think doing it earlier might have made me lose myself in the plethora of opportunities/problems to address. Doing it now lets me see the idea in context and brainstorm ways to make it fit in better with everything else. (I narrowly avoided using the word synergy just now. Whew, I’d better sit down and recover for a while.)

Your thesis is a consistent progression toward an idea. As it persists, it runs up against places, people, concepts that coexist alongside the work that is becoming your thesis. What is now possible because of these adjacencies? What is not? What does your thesis look like in the presence of this company? Create a visual representation of your thesis adjacencies. It can be physical or digital, tangible or conceptual, as long as it is clear.

I thought this would be a useful exercise to help me think beyond just the video chat layer. So I made a little diagram:

This diagram is by no means exhaustive, but I’ve put down what appears to be most germane, and it’s already a lot. If nothing else, doing this made me realize that there are so many more opportunities to “be deliberate” beyond just designing the cooking interface (which is really what I’ve been focusing on in the past weeks).

If I have extra time this week, I’ll do a few more exercises and post them here. (I’ve also decided that Omnigraffle on a huge monitor is vastly preferable to stickies on a wall.)