No Delightful Scotsman
I just finished reading John Pavlus’s “Delightful” Interaction Design Needs To Die, and I could not decide whether I agreed or disagreed. On the one hand, yes, twee and useless junk coating otherwise straightforward apps are an irritation to any right-thinking person. On the other, the subtle accumulation of well-designed presentations and feedback can create feelings of trust, ease, and, frankly, delight in the user. So, which is it?
It’s both, depending on one crucial definition: who is a True Scotsman?
We can go around and around all day on what true delightful design is. I am more than happy to offer my own explanation, based mostly on Dan Saffer’s excellent book and website, Microinteractions. Saffer writes:
A beautifully-crafted microinteraction pays attention to all four parts of a microinteraction.
A Trigger initiates a microinteraction. The Rules determine what happens, while Feedback lets people know what’s happening. Loops and Modes determine the meta-rules of the microinteraction.
For me, then, a true delightful design element obeys Saffer’s rules, announces itself elegantly, carries out its duties efficiently, responds clearly, and continues on with grace and certainty. Is that, then, delightful design?
No. Yes. It depends.
Pavlus cites reasons for disliking a particular element of Google’s Inbox tool. First, “It’s superficial”:
These little delight-delivery mechanisms, like Inbox’s mitosis-izing “reply all” icon, are like the wrapping paper on a Christmas present. They’re there to make an ingratiating first impression when firing up the app you’ve just downloaded. Once you’ve experienced that initial moment — which, sure, might be delightful — it’s done.
Fair enough. If the element in question is a one-time-only visual sparkle, it’s probably not worth it. All that glitters is not gold. But, well, it’s not not gold. For example, Area/Code’s infamously addictive game Drop7 has an astonishing number of almost instantaneous visual effects packed into routine actions:
To be fair, games are in a league of their own with feedback like this. No one ever got fired putting too much visual “delight” into them. Still, if you have played that game, you might be hard pressed to count, off the top of your head, everything that happens when the right piece lands in the right place. The reward is so satisifying and so in line with the overall experience, that it just feels right. Delightful, even, but not, in this well-designed case, superficial.
Which leads us back to Pavlus’s second point: “It’s unsustainable”:
If you opened the same Christmas presents every morning, Christmas presents would become utterly un-delightful. Delight necessarily includes an element of surprise. Unless your users are infants and your app plays peek-a-boo, happily surprising someone in the same way over and over again is impossible.
You can hit me thousands of times with Drop7's feedback, and I would not mind at all. I know this because I have been hit thousands of times with that feedback. But citing a game might be unfair at this point. Let’s bring in an example from a productivity app, Any.do, since I am willing to bet this one is the poster child for delightful design.
I have very little patience for anything getting in my way with a to-do list. I have burned through countless variations of apps like this, and anything that causes me to stumble even a little gets the app booted. With Any.do, one of its main features is a swipe right mechanic for marking your to-do list items complete. If you try it out, there are a ton of visual and other cues that would mark this as “delightful.” But it is also efficient, satisfying, and not the slightest bit irritating. And I’ve done hundreds of lovely little swipes.
Finally, Pavlus dislikes that “It’s not up to you.”
This is the big one. If I imagine teams of interaction designers all scheming about how to repeatedly extract a positive emotion out of me, I get queasy. Delight is a fleeting, idiosyncratic, irreducibly personal experience. Trying to mass-produce it and inject it into interactions is like forcing waiters to wear 37 pieces of flair on their uniforms.
First off, teams of interaction designers are always scheming about how to repeatedly extract positive emotion out of you, whether they are working on something “delightful” or otherwise. It’s their jam, their raison d’etre. Design is designed to manipulate you. If it didn’t, no one would do it. We cannot fault delightful design for this on its own.
Secondly, interaction designers are always trying to mass produce the effects they intend with their creations. Do you enjoy the heft and balance of your iPhone? Do you respond emotionally to the feel of the driver’s seat in your favorite car? Someone made that happen, and they made it happen on a mass scale, delightfully or not.
Finally, as for the flair, let’s get back to that True Scotsman. Does your app look this?
That is not good. Gaudy, unwelcome, irritating and… not delightful. By my (rather loose) definition, that is. If your designers piled on elements like buttons on suspenders in the service of making it delightful, shame on them. But, perhaps, that’s just bad delightful design. Every other aesthetic and school of thought has its exemplars and counter examples. “Flair” apps should be among the latter for delightful design.
Should delightful design die? Yes, it should. If it is not delightful. In which case, it was never delightful design in the first place. So, no, it should not.
As any true Scotsman well knows.
