The different delights of UX
Bad user experience leaves a lasting impression. We remember our frustrations, sometimes even taking to the internet to vent about it. There’s an entire subreddit community dedicated to poor UX choices called r/assholedesign wherein fed up users name and shame manipulative UI, obnoxious ads, and spam messaging.
What about good design? Can you recall a satisfying moment as easily as an annoying one? The thing about a good user experience is that it flows so effortlessly that it doesn’t stand out in our memory. Good UX works exactly as we expect it to–it is there and gone, remarkable because it is forgettable.
This is a paradox introduced to me by David C. Evans at the University of Washington. He taught my classmates and I that the paradox of experience excellence is this —
World class UX is frictionlessly forgettable but defining brand moments should be delightfully indelible.
Blows your mind a little, right? This seems like a near impossible balancing act to demand of UX professionals: make our experience forgettable, but unforgettable. Make it frictionless, but also nice enough that users want to stop to smell the metaphorical roses. So what do we do? If we want to aim for world class UX, how do we walk this line between unmemorable and unforgettable?
I don’t claim to have a perfect method for making perfect experiences, but I do have some ideas on what should be considered when approaching that nebulous idea of “delightful” UX.
Peak-end theory of memory
The class I took with David Evans was called The Psychology of User Experience, which emphasized the deep connections between the fields of psychology and user experience. To have an understanding of how the human mind works is to have an understanding of how users approach the myriad interfaces presented to them.
Along with the book he wrote, Bottlenecks: Aligning UX Design with User Psychology, he encouraged his students to read the highly influential work of Daniel Kahneman. If you’ve orbited the field of UX for more than a minute, this Kahneman reference probably comes as no surprise. The man knew his stuff. If you haven’t read Thinking, Fast and Slow then consider adding it to your reading list. It serves as a highly digestible, but practically comprehensive approach to understanding how people make decisions.
More specifically, Professor Evans introduced us to the research Kahneman did with Barbara Fredrickson on memory. They found that while most of our memories are ignored (What did you have for lunch last Tuesday?) what we do keep are stories. These stories that stay top of mind are typically peaks and/or ends.
The peak-end theory of memory is a cognitive bias toward intense emotional moments and the final moments of an experience. Whether positive or negative, we can better recall the emotional peaks of an experience, and its end.
So what does this have to do with delight? Obviously, in order to elicit delight, we have to design an experience that will have an emotionally positive peak. This is why we see Awwwards recipients with cute animations, clever interactions, and snarky but personable copy. Designers create this extra-oomph with delight in mind, trying to stand out from the crowd.
But is this how we should define delight? What should we focus on when trying to capture that positive peak?
Rethinking delight — don’t leave it on the surface
When doing research for this article, I found that “delight” seems to be misconstrued as synonymous to “quirky.” I saw this Has Pockets! tag on ModCloth and thought, “Oh, that’s delightful. They really know what their user base is looking for.” And sure, that’s one way to define delight. ModCloth delights their users by providing prudent information in an eye-catching, appealing way.
But is that really what delight is in UX? How do we define this nebulous thing that is demanded of us as designers?
In his book Designing for Emotion, Aarron Walter asks us as readers to reconsider Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. This redesigned pyramid places functionality, reliability, and usability as foundational and what must be prioritized before approaching the idea of pleasurability.
With this in mind, we can think of those quirky interactions, copy, and animations as surface delight. They focus on making the experience pretty, shiny, or in other words pleasurable. These pleasurable interfaces will give us as users that quick hit of dopamine, allowing for a peak experience. If they’re really good, then they might give us that delightfully indelible brand moment.
But we can’t forget about the other half of the paradox of world-class user experience: the idea that it is frictionlessly forgettable. For what Walter calls deep delight, we have to turn our attention to the base of the pyramid and make sure that our designs meet all of our users’ needs. If a design is functional, reliable, and usable then it should be essentially frictionless–there is nothing that gives users pause and takes them out of a flow state.
How to make a delightful user experience
World class UX is frictionlessly forgettable but defining brand moments should be delightfully indelible.
Considering what we just discussed, this statement shouldn’t be as intimidating as it was before. When approaching the nebulous idea of delight, the findings of Walter and Kahneman suggest that our efforts should be focused on the first half–making our experience frictionlessly forgettable through functionality, reliability, and usability. This allows for deep delight, an experience that works so well that it does not stick out in our memory.
Only after that frictionless experience is assured can we then turn to the fun stuff. Surface delight can be embedded into an experience by adding on the fun, quirky, cool extra bits that lead to a pleasurable experience and perhaps even a delightfully indelible brand moment.
This is how we remember an experience in a positive way. This is how we avoid winding up on r/assholedesign. It’s not such a fine line to walk if you prioritize the bottom of the pyramid before racing to the top.
