Back to Best Of

This week in ux-clinic: Can UI be funny?

This week in the ux-clinic discussion group:

We’re supposed to be designing a short tutorial for an on-line banking web-app. One of our designers made a kick-ass prototype that centers on humor (excellent cartoons of dropped ATM cards, customers crying after early withdrawls, etc.) – but the rest of the team is afraid to use it. Everyone from marketing to management has no experience using humor in design, and I need some help.

I think it’s totally appropriate, but I can’t for the life of me think of other examples where humor has been used in mainstream designs.

Can humor be appropriate in design? How do you decide when? Do you know of any examples of mainstream designs that use humor, even in documentation or support? Or are there good reasons why 99% of all design work everywhere is humorless?