Catering for Personalities Types When Designing Products
Part of my team and I recently went through a personality understanding test called eColors from Equilibria. To provide some context, in the eColors assessment, we take a short questionnaire to find out your distinct two personality traits represented by colors. For me, I’m a yellow (30%)-red (27%) and I’m proud to be one!
To provide even more context in terms of communication styles, people in red are doers, they prefer the ‘what’ to be direct, on point, similar to how consulting recommendations are organized to be recommendation first with explanations in the appendix. In the same light, people who are more green tend to be more detail oriented, going in depth into the ‘how’ side of things and require greater clarity of detail. Yellow folks have a tendency to focus on the ‘who’ aspect, i.e. person behind the message and blue folks focus on the ‘why’ to emphatize and relate.
Like many other types of personality toolkits available out there that I’ve taken, such as MBTI and emergenetics, I believe that the purpose of us taking these tests were two fold.
Firstly, it was to provide some insights on the way on how we worked internally and recognized our own working and communication styles. Secondly, the tool showed us how we should accommodate the communication styles preferred by the people we work with, so that we can work together more effectively.
While it was really fun and meaningful to spend the day with the team, understanding each other and figure out the nuances in communication styles, I reflected on how extensible this framework could be. Apart from using it to better our own communication with others, could we use it as part of the underlying principles for designing better products?
We know for a fact that most people in our organization is a combination of green-blue and there might be some cultural or location bias to it. For example, the trainer explained that people from Singapore tend to be more of the green-blue type. But this is where it gets interesting!
How do we use this information on preferred communication styles of our users to design and build better products? Modern tool kits and workshop processes behind design thinking tools tend to be all encompassing, and covers users across a wide range of users via persona design, given that they were purposed to build products for the masses. These consumer products have to be designed for everyone, belonging in all four major categories. However, if we design our product well, we should be able to customize the products we build to better engage and serve our customer needs.
In B2B or enterprise level product management, where our customer group size is small and their needs are niche, the information that these tools provide will be increasing relevant in your product design process.
Let me provide some examples to illustrate what I mean using a dashboard or a report generation product: a larger pool of data scientist or data engineers, (or even Singaporeans, since it is the dominant trait here) might be inherently more data-driven (Green-Blue type), and would appreciate the details through deep dives. In that case, they might prefer shallow high level summaries with the ability to go much deeper as required when viewing dashboards or reports.
Au contraire, for generalists managers or project managers, a larger number of these execution focused folks might instead fall under the yellow-red or red yellow group might prefer not to go too deep, but focus on concise summaries that flags out what needs to be done.
As product managers, while we are engaged with the team to build niche products for smaller user groups in the B2B or enterprise product management space, we instinctively gear ourselves toward creating maximum business value. The key takeaway is that while doing so, it is important to take care of the communication nuances that a large number of people within smaller user groups might have, and build it in a way that is more intuitive for the users.
I hope my reflection was interesting! Let me know in the comment section below if you have any thoughts!
