Delighting the Customer
One of my company’s 4 product principles is “Build to Delight.” In this post, I’ll discuss this principle and give you some ideas for how you can delight your customers with your products.
Build to Delight is one of my company’s 4 product and development principles — honestly, it’s great to have this as one of our core values. By calling it out as a key element of any work we do, it helps ensure that the customer’s happiness is always considered in all the features we work on and release.
What isn’t Delight?
Delight is a tricky word and is often misinterpreted as a design feature that can be applied at the surface layer of the product.
Wrongly so, delight is largely considered a “trick” that designers can add to the user interface to make customers giddy about using the product.
A quick search for “Delight the Customer” on Google returns an article from Harvard Business School titled “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers.” That’s right, a whole article from a top business school that bases its entire premise on the misinterpretation of what it means to delight your customer!
As the article points out, delighting your customer, if interpreted simply as “over-the-top-service” or “over-the-top-fun-ness” in the UI, it’s probably not going to achieve its purpose. Assume that your customers are smart. They can tell when you and consequently, your application is sincerely interested in their well-being.
If you’re being insincere, you’re setting yourself up for delight backlash, where those little touches meant to delight become annoyances and can have the opposite effect.
Delight is not over-the-top efforts of service or extreme customer satisfaction.
It is not delightful to simply satisfy a customer’s utilitarian needs with a service.
It’s not delightful if it only meets their expectations.
It is not delightful when a cute animation happens but the product fails to help them meet their goals.
Ok. What is Delight?
Instead of over-the-top service, delight them with a simple, quick solution to their problem.
Instead of trying to delight them with utilitarian needs, appeal to their emotional needs.
Instead of aiming for extreme customer satisfaction, search for what you can do to help your customer experience a positive emotional state of joy when experiencing success in your product.
Don’t just meet customer expectations, surpass them in a way that elicits positive emotions.
Before you add flair to the surface of your product, ensure that your product is exceptional all the way down.
Five Areas of Delight for your Product.
There are five general areas that you can address to improve how well your product will delight your customer.
1. Match the Customer Goal
This seems so obvious, yet so many products miss the mark. Customers do not use your products just for the privilege of using your product.
They are using it to solve a problem they are working on. Their goal is never to use your product for the sake of using it.
Consider the goal of someone who purchases a supercar such as the legendary Lamborghini Countach. Their goal is not to drive a car or anything even close to why most people purchase a car. Their goal is all about how it makes them feel, and how it makes them look to others.
In the world of software, a customer’s goal might not even be the thing that your product does. It might be something secondary such as impressing their co-workers or boss and feeling good about their work.
It is often the secondary goals that fuel delight. Observe users to understand not only what they say and do, but get inside their heads and understand their motivations.
2. Make it Friendly
In a retail setting, studies have shown that people are delighted when they perceive effort from employees in solving their problems, being friendly, helpful, personable, and sharing their expertise.
If we think of our products not as software, but as a proxy for ourselves providing a service directly to the customer — would the app act or speak differently?
Consider language, tone, dress, all those things you’d consider if you had to present yourself in-person to help a customer directly.
3. Make it Fun
Most people wouldn’t ever consider dental work a fun thing.
Dentists know this, and they’ve managed to take uncomfortable, painful, maybe even the worst of all possible experiences and make it a little bit fun for adults and kids alike.
As early as 1844, dentists were using Nitrous Oxide or “laughing gas” not only for its anesthetic properties but for its delightful effect of laughter that takes the edge off what is never going to be a great experience.
Another example from healthcare is told by Doug Deitz in his Ted Talk “Design Thinking Journey: Using Empathy to turn Tragedy into Triumph.” After observing the emotional experience that children and their parents confronted in health care situations where MRI scans were required, Doug realized that the particular cold aesthetic that appealed to engineers and designers of MRI machines had a terrifying effect on children in the hospital that resulted in difficulty, erroneous scans, and unhappy patients.
A solution to transform these MRI machines into something “fun” had a real impact on the experience of patients as well as providing better outcomes and fewer errors.
4. Make it Fast
There’s something inherently delightful about speed. In almost every industry there’s an aspect of speed that drives customer perceptions and behavior.
Speed is often employed for entertainment — we like the feeling of going fast and we are willing to pay money for that feeling alone.
We are delighted when products and services exhibit this quality. Many products are competing only on the basis of speed. We are delighted when a company offers faster service, faster delivery, faster devices, faster internet, and faster loading.
In a study from 2016, Google published that 53% of customers leave a website page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, and 70% of customers admit that speed influences their likeliness to buy.
In 2018 another study showed that the average load speed for a website is nearly 5 seconds on a desktop computer and 11 seconds on a mobile device.
Delighting with speed isn’t about being average or meeting the minimums. For customers to notice and be impressed, we need to be significantly better than average.
Fortunately for you, the average is pretty bad. If you can make your application load in 1 or 2 seconds, there’s a good chance your customer will notice.
4. Remove the Bad Friction
As mentioned above in “Matching the Goal” — customers are using your product to solve a problem that matters to them, they are not there to use your product.
If they chose your product, it’s because they see it as a bridge to get them where they want to go. They don’t want to be on the bridge all the time and the shorter and faster you can make that journey for them, the better.
In the classic book “A Wrinkle In Time” by Madeline L’Engle, characters describe how they are able to travel across time and space using this metaphor of an ant traversing a string.
We can think of our product or app like this line — any steps, barriers or friction that we can remove, the faster the journey will be for our customers to the goal that they want.
At a very detailed level, remove every step, click, mouse move, scroll, anything that doesn’t need to be there.
5. Make it Fancy
Aesthetic value is a real value that an object possesses in its capacity to elicit pleasure or displeasure when experienced aesthetically.
People like things that are decorated beautifully and have a refined artistic quality. It is the one exception where people may want to own or use the product simply because of the way that it is.
Animation and motion can have a big impact on the perception of a product. Not only does it catch the eye—people will perceive the time and craft that the team put into making something less ordinary.
Clean, beautiful design can elicit emotional effects from users — even to the point of people associating themselves with one product over another because of the way that it “feels” to them.
In all of these things, it’s critical to remember that true delight can only come after the basic expectations and needs of the customer have been met.
In his book Designing for Emotion, Aaron Walter presents a hierarchy that closely mirrors Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Without the functional, reliable, usable foundations, there’s little use for pleasurable parts.
Focusing on delight when you haven’t established a foundation in your product can result in delight backlash or draw unwanted attention to features or problems that will make it seem even worse.
What will bring delight to your customers is likely a moving target. We’re delighted at first by some special element, effect, or surprising feature. After we’ve experienced it a few times it becomes normal and even expected.
Something special can quickly become mundane or boring when it’s overused or commonplace.
The Great Pyramids of Egypt were once covered with a polished limestone surface that is said to have created a “mirror-like finish” that would have been glorious and (delightful?) to see.
As you consider all the delightful aspects of your product, don’t forget that even without that final layer of polished limestone, and without the perfect finished point at the top, the Great Pyramids are still really great and millions of people are delighted just by how great they are.
