Distance the ‘Delight’
What does delight truly mean in user experiences
We often refer to experiences being ‘delightful’ and bringing the ‘wow’ factor to products and services we design. It is typically used to describe high degree of gratification and pleasure or a feeling of great happiness, and often frivolously dropped in conversations as a must-have attribute in a given design brief and a feeling synonymous to a product or service experience. This in turn is taken so literally by designers and experience creators that the focus on creating this feeling of ‘delight’, often drifts one away from the process of rendering the real intent and solving the core problem.
Fundamentally, ‘delight’ is giving somebody great pleasure and joy. The triggers for evoking this feeling have evolved overtime, especially in the realm of experience design. With the fast changing times, one witnesses an altered and evolving perception and expectation from the feeling of delight, which has been felt differently by different people in different scenarios.
The Dynamic Nature of Delight
From the emphasis on ergonomic efficiency of tools and workplaces by the Greeks in 5000 BC, to the early vision of improving the interaction between labourers and their tools by Frederick Taylor in the early 1900’s, to humanising production systems by Toyota in 1940, delight came from making man and machine interfaces more functional and user-friendly.
Then came the era of ‘designing for people’, a concept introduced by Henry Dreyfuss in 1955. This thinking was then taken to an all new level by Walt Disney, where his team of imagineers, as he called them — had to imaginatively use technology to bring people ‘joy’, communicating with colour, shape, form, texture and so on. Delight found a new meaning.
The 70’s and 80’s introduced the ‘meaning of good design’ and initiated the revolution of building technology and computers for humans, helmed by Apple, Xerox and Industrial designer Dieter Rams. Apples’s first mass-market PC featured a graphical user interface, built-in screen, and mouse. The early UX designers weren’t trying to make aesthic choices by pushing beautiful pixels: but were just trying to make everything work. This new technology was still delightful for every new adopter.
Then came the golden period of Don Norman joining apple as a user experience professional to design human-centric products. Apple made history in 2007 with the iPhone’s super user experience, with its revolutionary touchscreen promise. It promised to be far ‘easier to use’ than any other smartphone on the market and the definition of delight found a new benchmark.
Over the years the breadth and depth of design experiences have scaled, creating new milestones and bringing new revelations of feeling delight. However, one aspect that remains constant is finding delight through ‘human-centred interactions’.
Deciphering Delight Today
As Paul Papas, global leader of IBM Interactive Experience said: “The last best experience that anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experiences they want everywhere.”
This experience could be with a product, a service, a person or a location. It could be something as small as a call with a customer service professional or a quick checkout at an event, and something as big as a complete stay experience at a hotel or a shopping journey on an e-commerce platform.
Feeling delight has slowly become directly proportional to the level of engagement and satisfaction that we derive from an experience and the relevance of it to our needs and context at a point in time. The experience that stands by us come storm or sunshine, in haste or in leisure, in happy or difficult times (may sound dramatic), but imagine these scenarios:
- You have scheduled a pickup to the airport and the driver cancels last minute. You are automatically matched to another driver and you can focus on saying your goodbyes.
- You need that one ingredient for a recipe you have been eager to try. You don’t panic as you know you can schedule one to reach you in 10 minutes, by paying that little extra.
- You have added four Christmas gifts to your cart and added four addresses to be delivered to.. and Voila! You checkout with one single payment.
- Your daily meditation app gradually takes you from easy to intense meditation practices, based on your pace and learning with clear milestones for you to achieve.
- You know you have been really late in placing your dinner order, but you know you will get your meal in the promised time. You are tracking it coming to you and are being informed realtime about any further delay.
- You get an added, unexpected surprise when you are about to checkout. Your points that would have expired this month are auto-applied for a discount and alternatively you get to choose from rewards that you can buy from it.
Although our affinity towards using the word has become synonymous to the feeling of novelty, the element of surprise and sudden peak of joy, these are the experiences we keep coming back for. The ones that create extended loyalty.
We forget to recognise the aspects we cherish. We take for granted the consistency that retains our trust and the efficiency that allows us to focus on other important tasks. The coherence we feel with the broader product/service narrative and faith in its quality of delivery. These build a loyal user base overtime.
Any delight in spurts, incongruent with the product/service narrative will harm, more than elevate the eventual experience. You execute an order flawlessly, earn 500 points, the product gets delivered beautifully. But then you need to return it as it is damaged. And there you are on a long call with the support team. Does the momentry delight whitewash the experience that follows?
Don’t Undermine the Value of an Effortless Experience
Delight can become gimmicky and transitional if it fails to ignore the primary intent and the foundation of the experience. Sometimes the ‘daily’, ‘regular’ experiences bring the warm feeling of comfort and dependability, urging us to keep coming back.
This Gartner study Effortless Experience highlights the importance for companies to build effortless experiences rather than focus on creating delight. As quoted by them “In reality, exceeding expectations, or delighting customers, may create “feel good” moments, but doing so has low impact on loyalty or repeat business”. For long lasting customers, loyalty depends on how easy you make it for the customers to complete their tasks, do their business and reach their goals.
The delight of scratching a card and receiving a 5% cashback cannot mute down the experience of a payment failure during checkout. The negativity bias will make users recall negative events more than positive ones and they are more likely to leave with a bitter taste in their mouths.
The Aarron Walter’s hierarchy of user needs (much like Maslow’s hierarchy), defined in the book Designing for Emotion, emphasises on layering a product. The base being functionality and having a useful purpose for the user, then focusing on making it reliable and consistent in its offerings, followed by usability which aims to save effort and time of the user. Only after these needs are fulfilled, can the user appreciate the delightful and pleasurable aspects of the experience.
The NN Group article further defines the two types of delights. one being the surface delight, which is local and contextual; it is usually derived from largely isolated interface features. The other one is deep delight which is holistic, and is achieved once all user needs are met, including functionality, reliability, usability, and pleasurability.
When we design our products and services, let’s look at this layering approach. We should strive to dissipate the transient nature of delight and aim to weave it into the larger narrative. Rendering and delivering the first 3 layers of the pyramid and then bringing in delight as a layer of ganache will not only delight, but keep your users satiated.
Thoughts put together by
Priyanka Shroff
