Designing for “delight” is dead
The ultimate goal of product design has to be well-being — not delight.
Humor me a moment, will you?
Here at Delightful Slot Machines Inc., we have one simple mission: to create the most damn delightful slot machines in the industry. Even on a crowded casino floor lined with blinking pachinko machines and video poker, Delightful Slots call to gamblers of every ilk.
Win or lose, you’ll walk away happy after a few pulls of a Delightful Slot Machine.
See, it all started when one of our Lead Game Designer read Aaron Walter’s Design for Emotion on the subway into work. Every morning, she learned more and more about the delight pyramid, a fascinating concept built on the notion that great user experiences are functionally sound, reliable, and usable. On top of that, the best products achieve an ultimate goal: they are pleasurable and delightful.
Fair enough! we exclaimed in unison when the designer finished explaining it all. In fact, we all had just finished reading Don Norman’s Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things, where the value of delight was similarly emphasized.
So we decided to go all in on Walter’s pyramid. We started focusing on creating our slot machines with a singular end goal: delight. That’s why our newest product comes with a monitor that tracks arousal levels through electrodermal activity. When these readings dip and the user clearly isn’t delighted, we amp up the delight and send them a delight blast to keep them hooked.
We also created a virtual reality feature so that our users don’t have to deal with anything that will distract them from delight — like a clock, or text messages from significant others nagging them to stop playing slots with family savings.
With delight as our new North Star, we’ll continue to drive differentiation and nurture the most loyal customer base in the midsize casino video gaming machines industry!
Overly satirical? Maybe. But …
Designing for delight has become a pseudo gold standard in product design, for better or worse.
That said, simply designing for delight alone seems so pervasive and so … wrong.
Before you bite my head off, hear me out. Admittedly, the concept of designing for delight used to make sense to me. On many occasions, I’ve been the designer introducing himself as being “passionate about designing delightful experiences.”
No disrespect intended to the pioneers of this approach; I do believe that the idea of “delight” has served an important role. At the very least, it got us thinking beyond functional requirements to understand the deeper emotional story. But we’re in a different place now.
We’ve seen the negative impact that “deeply delightful” technologies can have on mental health. There’s a fine line between delight and dependency.
We’ve also examined the role of a designer as the conscience of a company and the catalyst for inclusive product change — not just a deliverer of delight. All things considered, I believe we are ready for a different end goal.
The inherent problem with designing for delight
At the risk of beating a dead horse, here’s the problem with designing for delight. As consumers, we invite products into our homes, relationships, and daily routines. The products we use shape the very ways we live. We ignore that simple truth when we design products with delight as our end goal.
More specifically, we create a wall around our product interaction and ignore the broader life impact. Pulling the lever on the slot machine and watching the numbers spin, over and over, might bring some delight, sure. But what about the effect that these products have on our lives outside of the interaction?
Never mind that these delightful experiences might also prey on our impulses, make us distrust ourselves, and even put us in an unstable financial position. As long as the slot machine is functional, reliable, usable, and delightful, we’ve done our job …
It’s a myopic way of looking at the impact of the products we create. Because whether we recognize it or not, products transcend immediate interactions and affect our lives. Pull slot machines long enough and delight will turn to pervasive despair.
At best, this approach minimizes the positive impact a product can have. It’s essentially saying the most a product can be is a rainbow cannon, spewing delight rays at us.
At worst, this approach creates products that are harmful. Those delight rays can be toxic in high doses?… so be it. Well-being be damned.
The new end goal: designing for well-being
It’s time to rework Aaron Walter’s hierarchy of user needs a bit, with a new end goal at the top. In this new iteration, we’ll keep the bottom levels. A product does have to have a strong, reliable, and usable foundation to play a deeper role in people’s lives.
At the top though, we’re dumping delightful/pleasurable, and we’re replacing it with humanized. As in, designed to create the best conditions for our lives.
In order to humanize a product, we have to do two things:
- Understand how the product interaction touches deeper motivations and impacts people’s broader lives (we call this the “deeper story”)
- Figure out how to add deeper value to people’s lives (beyond functional utility or delight)
Here are two examples to show you what this revised hierarchy looks like in practice.
Example 1: Visiting your primary care physician
Everybody’s favorite, right? But primary care visits are non-negotiables, and they’re experiences that we can design in very different ways based on what we prioritize.
- Design for functionality/reliability: If we prioritize functionality and reliability, we may focus on minimizing wait times, allowing patients to chat with a provider, and offering remote visits for certain visit types.
- Design for delight. If we prioritize delight, we may design for a less sterile or harsh ambiance — with calming music, plants, or perhaps sparkling water upon arrival.
- Design for well-being. If we prioritize well-being, we seek to understand the deeper story and add a deeper form of value…
Deeper story
Engaging with one’s health can be unnerving and jeopardize our feeling of protection. It can trigger a feeling of vulnerability. And the reality is that many people ignore their health as a natural defense mechanism. In fact, as many as half of all cancer patients ignore warning signs.
Walking into the doctor can pose a threat to our well-being and this can trigger our stress response. It can cause us to evaluate our fragile existence, and that’s something a La Croix can’t fix.
Deeper value
For example, Forward Health conducts a genetic test for each patient to understand their risk level for common diseases. This data initiates an open dialogue about the scary things, shining a light on them and bringing them out into the open. And it helps patients establish proactive strategies to cope with potential future vulnerabilities.
This is not as effervescent as a La Croix, but it could have a much more positive impact on a patient’s life.
Example 2: Booking a vacation
Vacationing is the opposite of going to the doctor. But the approach still applies.
- Design for functionality/reliability: If we prioritize functionality and reliability, we may focus on designing a more seamless checkout experience.
- Design for delight. If we prioritize delight, we may focus on slick animations that make the experience feel more seamless.
- Design for well-being. If we prioritize well-being, we seek to understand the deeper story and add a deeper form of value…
Deeper story
For many people, traveling touches the core of our well-being. It’s an act of self-expansion, a way to expand the boundaries of who we are and how we live. To escape the mundane and try new things.
Deeper value
Knowing this allows companies to go way beyond a frictionless experience. For example, AirBNB’s redesign acknowledged this when it oriented its search experience around exploratory categories. Now when you search, you’re presented with unique lifestyle categories that allow you to discover and design a more expressive trip. Almost like you are trying out a new way of life.
Granted, the idea of humanizing products is not completely novel. My guess is that you already approach design like this in some ways, whether you notice it or not.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t credit Trent Harris and the Center for Humane Technology, who have done tremendous work to push this movement forward. They focus on exploring human vulnerabilities and our cognitive biases to create technology that isn’t unintentionally harmful to us. Jon Yablonksi, too, whose Humane by Design resource makes the idea of humanizing products more concrete by specifying specific UI tactics.
We love this important work and how the authors approach this problem.
But we sit on the other side of the problem. Instead of focusing on understanding human vulnerabilities and minimizing harm, we focus on understanding human motivations and maximizing well-being.
Both are necessary. To meet these needs, we created a framework to understand holistic well-being. The framework helps us avoid the tendency to rely on intuition and experience alone, bringing in science-backed factors that help avoid bias and confusion.
Introducing The Periodic Table of Human Elements
Our framework, the Periodic Table of Human Elements, came from our work at MIT’s Ideation Lab. We surveyed a wide variety of work in the fields of Humanistic Psychology, Positive Psychology, and Evolutionary Biology. It’s also based on our own study with about 500 people, which I’ve written about here.
The Periodic Table is made up of 20 “human elements.” Each is a factor that has been shown to relate to well-being and our ability to live a good life (whatever that may mean to each of us). We like to remind people that, with ~8 billion unique humans on the planet, there is no singular notion of what a human needs. However, there are well-studied factors that are related to well-being.
We use this framework in both steps of humanizing a product.
To understand the deeper story, we use quantitative and qualitative methods to pinpoint which human elements are most triggered in a product interaction. In the primary care example above, we focused on PROTECTION (element #2). In the vaction example, we focused on SELF-DESIGN (element #11).
On any given project, we end up identifying 2–3 significantly important elements that are relevant in that product interaction. We then analyze what specifically triggers these human elements and we develop opportunities for innovation.
To add deeper value to people’s lives, it’s our job to figure out how to leverage this deeper understanding to provide a deeper value in people’s lives. This involves ideating new features based on each human element.
We have created ideation prompts and examples to open up the ideation space, so to speak. This often leads to perfectly simplistic and intuitive ideas that hadn’t come up before. We find there is often a game-changing — often obvious — idea, ripe for the picking.
From there, we can group features into categories to create actionable value props that add deeper value to people’s lives — the critical last step.
Final takeaways
Well-being is such a powerful design cue because it prompts so much of our day-to-day decision-making. Even so, it’s surprisingly easy to ignore this deeper realm.
As you return to your own design journeys, here are a few things to remember about humanized design and the Periodic Table of Human Elements:
- Designing for delight has become a pervasive idea in the design/innovation space
- The idea traces back to Aaron Walter’s concept of the delight pyramid
- Walter posits that “delighting” customers is the goal of product development/UX
- We argue that our end goal as product designers has to be well-being
- As consumers, we invite products into our lives and they end up shaping the very way we live
- Designers have a responsibility to create products that add deeper value to our lives (i.e. improve well-being)
Hello!
I’m Alex Klein. I’ve been practicing new product development and innovation for 12 years. I founded Team Human, a Chicago-based innovation consultancy. We work with companies to launch differentiated products that improve well-being.
I’d love to connect! Say hey on Linkedin or set up a time to chat.
Need help humanizing your product/service? Check out Team Human.
References
- Aaron Walters. Designing for Delight.
- Nielsen Norman Group. A Theory of User Delight: Why Usability Is the Foundation for Delightful Experience.
- Don Norman. Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things.
- Nir Eyal. Hooked.
- The Wall Street Journal. Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show.
- Equity Army. Foundational Principles.
- In Denial: Why Do We Often Ignore Medical Symptoms, When We Know Better?
- Whitaker et al. Help-seeking for cancer ‘alarm’ symptoms: a qualitative interview study of primary care patients in the UK
- Washington Post. How to stress less about going to the doctor
- Brent Mattingly & Lewandowski. Broadening Horizons: Self-Expansion in Relational and Non-Relational Contexts
- AirBNB. The Airbnb 2022 Summer Release: Introducing a new Airbnb for a new world of travel
- Center for Humane Technology
- Jon Yablonski. Humane By Design
