Design & Facilitate
Brand Personality Workshops
As a product designer, my ultimate goal is to enhance customer satisfaction—improving usability and providing a pleasurable experience in the interactions between the customer and the product. A brand personality is essential to create products that customers can love. A brand personality is a set of emotional and associative characteristics of your product and often mirrors the target customer’s personality.
Below is a description of the one-day brand workshop that our team conducted for The OpenLearning Project with McGraw Hill Executive Leadership, which can be used to build a personality for a new product.
The Open Learning Project
Before the workshop, the project business stakeholders were already well-informed about the vision and requirements for the new product. The participants were asked to be prepared for some fun conversations about how users should experience The OpenLearning Project.
To kick off the workshop and break the ice, each attendee was asked the following questions: What is their favorite food? What is their all-time favorite TV show/movie? This activity allowed the workshop participants to get to know each other in a much more fun and exciting way than the usual “name and background” introductions. Participants had an opportunity to bond over shared likes and experiences.
Design and Emotion—Group Discussion
We want our customers to commit to our products by creating an emotional connection with our products and brand. How do some products take a piece of our hearts? How do the interfaces of these products make us feel connected and appreciated? The fact that we react emotionally to products means that products speak to humans, not computers. Users want intuitive and desirable experiences.
Activity 1
Picture Voting
In preparation for this activity, collect related and non-related images, such as cars, home appliances, accessories, top recognizable brands, and familiar apps and websites. Hang these images on a wall in the workshop area.
We asked our participants which of these pictures represented the personality traits they wanted to see in The OpenLearning Project. They had 20 minutes to study the pictures and vote on images directly by drawing a “green check mark” for photos with desirable attributes and a “red cross mark” with undesirable attributes. While the participants were voting, we reminded them that their votes were not about their personal preferences regarding the images but about how well the images represented MHE’s brand promise and our future OpenLearning project customers.
Once the participants had voted, we asked them to tell us which images they voted for and against and to give us adjectives describing the desired and undesired attributes.
The Tone of Voice Intro
The tone is the way we communicate our personality. Imagine our product as a person having a conversation with our users.
Based on Nielsen Norman Group research, there are four primary tone-of-voice dimensions (serious, formal, respectful, and matter-of-fact). An error message illustrates how the tone changes with each dimension.
Activity 2
Seeing Through the User’s Perspective
We divided our participants into three groups and gave them three personas representing an instructor, adjunct, and student. After the participants read each user profile, we asked them to rate OpenLearning on the Brand Personality Spectrum and write an error message based on The OpenLearning Project brand personality using the voice and tone dimensions.
Note: The personas were developed based on the OpenLearning Project user research conducted before the workshop on a competitor’s users. This research included remote interviews, focus groups, and a survey. During this research/discovery phase, we asked Instructors about their roles, features that complement and hinder their instruction, and perceived switching costs to a new product. Student personas were developed from focus groups with higher education students. Students were asked about their course goals and their experience using educational technology.
Activity 3
I am OpenLearning, and I am…
Based on MHE's Vision, Mission, and Brand Promise and discovered themes during user research and all desirable attributes found in the earlier workshop activities, we asked our participants to tell us who The OpenLearning Project would be as a person. What kind of personality traits would OpenLearning have? The results were as follows:
The OpenLearning Project is:
Engaging
Intuitive
Effective
Personalized
A Partner
OpenLearning Personality and Tone is:
Friendly
Transparent
Casual
Motivational
Serious