The importance of being represented
You are building your product for diverse audience, why not present them in your product illustrations?
I love illustrations. I have several children’ books in languages I don’t read just because I love the pictures, the style, the colours and the characters. I find that you can explain with a good illustration what you cannot explain in a thousand words (and the artistic value is higher than a shutterstock image).
This is why when I started working with the talented Shaked Sheinman I could not be happier. Finally a kindred-soul who would understand my passion to have illustrations in my products. A most powerful addition to simplify and explain to the user what they need to know in order to use my products. When we started working together we set a few ground rules for the illustrations: they should be helpful and in the right place (so I had to hold myself to not overload screens with images) and they should represent all types of users from various gender and ethnicity.
But why is it important to have different genders and ethnic groups represented in your product? Microsoft Clippy was just fine in its ambiguous office supply way, isn’t that enough? I would like to state that if you want your users to relate to your product and feel that it was built for them, you should show people who look like your users using it.
Google recently launched new emoticons to add representation to more groups in the population and create a more inclusive keyboard. Apple allows you to turn yourself into an emoji. The technology world is moving away from the generic ambiguous representation (sorry clippy) towards human characters that one can actually relate and identify with.
Next time you want to add a generic image of a businessman to your marketing material/ product pages/ release notes, pause for a minute and think: “does this guy really represent all of my users?” (and note that in most cases, it is a guy).
What you should be aiming for with an addition of an image or an illustration, is to have your user imagine themselves using your product successfully.
And if you are lucky enough to work with a talented illustrator, not only will they be able to visualise themselves doing that, but they will also rejoice in the beautiful illustrations.
