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UX Design: Building in Delight
How to make sure that you are adding real, unexpected value; not fluff
TL;DR
Delight is unexpected value in the form of simplicity, convenience, and/or satisfaction. In order to add delight, you must make sure your core offering(s)/functionality is fully developed and serves your users’ needs well first.
Delight is the desert of the user experience, and everyone wants a piece whether they admit it or not.
Overview
If you’ve been in UI/UX for any length of time, you’ve heard the term “delight” thrown around ad-nauseam.
What does it mean? What creates delight for our users?
Let’s talk about it now.
Product as coffee
Let’s start with an analogy: your successful product should be like a good cup of coffee, let’s say a cappuccino for this example.
Here, we have the actual coffee, cream, sugar, and some room to breathe between the top of the liquid and the lip of the cup so that the user can blow on and sip the coffee, aerate it, effectively taste it, and not burn themselves in the process.
Stay with me now.
Creating delight
Let’s slap on some whipped cream and tasteful sprinkles to add some unexpected value to our product.
And look at that!
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The user got cream and sugar in their coffee already, so it’s a safe bet that whipped cream on top probably isn’t going to offend them (but if it does, we’ll take it out after user testing the approach, that’s the point).
What we just witnessed here is the exact same process that a team can go through to add unexpected value to their product in the form of delight.
