On local personalities
The January 28th episode of Under The Radar, Apps With Personality, left me thinking about just why software from bigger software publishers tend to be more… well, bland.
A lot of it surely comes down to the design-by-committee (or, in the worst case, design-by-accountants/lawyers) way of working that David and Marco alluded to, but I think there's something else worth considering.
Every business-school student has heard the (actually false) Chevy Nova “legend”, whereby GM execs scratched their heads in trying to figure out why sales of the car were so poor in Latin America. It serves as a warning against moving your business into foreign markets without doing your homework first. In 2016 parlance, it speaks to the importance of inclusivity.
While words that are homonyms across tongues may be the low-hanging fruit of localization, “personality” may be one of the most difficult. The personality created for an inanimate object often comes from cultural significance that may not be universally understood. Some of the animism described in the KonMari method—thanking your shoes for a long day of supporting you, for example—just doesn't translate well in Western consumer/capitalist society, where race-to-the-bottom market economics has associated the shoe with a thing to be disposed of, not thanked.
In the podcast, Carrot Weather was rolled out as an example of an app with strong personality.
And it is. That maniacal AI/robot has a charm a that keeps some users (myself included) coming back.
But how easily can that be localized? Even with good translations for the spoken quips, things like the secret-location Easter eggs are hard. Some might be universally understood, like the Moon, and some pop-culture references (see: Star Wars) might be almost universal, but is Mount Doom meaningful to someone in Ulaanbataar?
And therein lies the rub. An indie developer that wants to inject strong personality in an app often doesn't have the resources to localize said personality to all regions in which it will sell, and a large company will probably want to invest those resources elsewhere—especially with profitability on the App Store being what it is these days.
So, the former designs something as a result of their cultural context, with whatever lack of universality that may result. The latter “blands down” their design, in an effort to find some lowest common denominator.