Are You Delighted With This Article?

On my last intranet redesign project, as I was presenting the design the CMO asked me “So what are we doing for surprise and delight?”. My first thought was that the users would be both surprised and delighted if when they came to the intranet they were able to find the information they were looking for, something which was not always the case at the time. With my information architect hat on, I thought, really, that should have been enough. But is it? What does “delight” have to do with usability?

There’s been plenty of recent research supporting the role of emotion and aesthetics in design, but as individuals, we don’t need to read a study to know that it matters. Each of us will have objects or screens we either love, or hate to use every day. But the objects or interfaces we love the most also need to work well. I love the feel of the keyboard I use to type this, but if it didn’t get the words on the screen properly I could easily grow to hate it. Peter Hancock expressed this in 2005 as he adapted Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for the UX world, placing functionality and usability toward the base of the pyramid, and pleasure and perfection (what he called Hedonomics) at the peak.

This principle can easily be applied to all types of interactions. CEB, a business research company, recently published the book “Effortless Experience,” critiquing customer service metrics which relied on “delighting” customers. They found, unsurprisingly, that people don’t want “delightful” customer service, they’d rather nothing went wrong in the first place. Many companies had assumed that great customer service led to greater customer loyalty but it turns out that this wasn’t a reliable predictor at all.

CEB’s research seems to suggest that there is no role for “delight” in the customer experience. But this could be because the research focused on call centers — i.e. places dealing with customers who have problems. Hancock, Norman and many others remind us that delight, joy, and similar positive emotions can in fact be incredibly important in designing products that people will use again and again, but only if we get the basics right. Ultimately we need to ensure that the user experience is both effortless and delightful.