What’s Y our App’s Personality?

Your design choices—whether conservative or zany—give your app a personality. Just like people, apps are irresistible when their personalities are in tune with both audience and context. An efficient, just-the-facts design lends an air of confidence to a productivity app. Warm wood textures, meanwhile, give other apps an organic feeling that is both homey and luxurious. Don’t let your app’s personality emerge by accident. Before you start tinkering with color schemes, graphics, and navigation models, consider how you’d like people to perceive your app. Businesslike and authoritative? Comforting and familiar? Sunny and upbeat? Sleek and poised? Homespun and crafty? Gritty and edgy? Fun and toylike? Opulent and plush?

By choosing a personality for your app before you start crafting its visual identity, you give yourself a framework for making consistent decisions based on the emotional vibe you’re after. Don’t dismiss this as touchy-feely hokum: an emotional vibe is the basis for all marketing and storytelling, and make no mistake, your app is in fact a story. In the very personal context of the iPhone, people think about an app as content more than “software,” an experience more than a tool, and entertainment more than a task. Your app’s personality sets the mood of that experience and it has to suit its audience as well as the job at hand. When you marry the aesthetics of a thing to both its function and its owner, you get something that is beautiful, functional, and distinct. This feng shui alchemy evaporates when those elements go out of sync, so go carefully as you make your design decisions.