There's something to be said about products which have a certain character to them. The first example that comes to mind is MailChimp though they seem to have distanced their monkey quite a bit these days. Another set of opinionated products are from the 37Signals stable, but they don't try to dress them up in a character, in my opinion.
I was surprised to find FeedBurner, now a Google product still holding on to their quirkiness. I love how their their main navigation reads: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize, Troubleshootize
The "Troubleshootize" page carries forward the character and gives a fun spin to the standard FAQs.
And the dashboard tries to pull a page out of Flickr's book with random welcome messages.
It's a bit sad that their integration with Blogger is not smooth & completely frictionless, but that's a different story altogether.
Something that I've always wondered is whether such quirky copy (or "copy with character", as I like to call it) works with the general Indian internet audience? Or should one play it safe and produce plain-vanilla "transactional copy." What do you think? Any Indian products with such character that you know about?
Amul?
ReplyDeleteI can add Picnik photo editor to the list (it isn't Indian though). Speaking as a true blue Indian, I love quirky engaging copy. When I was test driving the chrome browser, I had to uninstall the browser when I changed laptops and was struck by their "goodbye" message which simply said " was it something we did?".
ReplyDeletePerhaps the language that appeals to us might be slightly different, but yeah, I think copy with character would appeal to us too.