User Delight and Expectations Framework
Jan 20, 2022
What is “User Delight”?
A delightful experience creates a lasting impression, inspiring users to share it and return. However, not all experiences achieve this. In the product design & implementation process, prioritizing delight can be difficult for designers and teams, often due to a lack of a shared understanding. An experience might guide a user from point A to point B, yet feel incomplete or lacking attention to detail. This isn't due to a lack of desire to create delightful experiences, but rather the absence of a common framework to prioritize them.
This is a framework that I use with my teams that aims to create a common understanding of delight and build for it.
Modeling Delight
What is “User Delight”?
Delight occurs when a product or service surpasses user expectations, leading to excitement, satisfaction, or happiness. This positive emotional response, such as "It was faster, better, easier than I expected," arises when users gain more value than anticipated from their intended goal. Consider the initial experience of "Tap to Pay" and its unexpected convenience, despite being a simple interaction.
Identifying delight can be complex because often it is not expressed explicitly by the user. They will not always vocalize enjoyable parts of an interaction when the interface works as expected. As a result, it can be challenging to quantify and study what truly makes a user experience delightful.
Types of delight
From Nielsen Norman Group: Aarron Walter's hierarchy of user needs defines basic user needs that interfaces must fulfill before more advanced needs can be addressed. Once a foundation of functionality, reliability, and usability are achieved, delight can be pursued. There are two types of delight:
Deep delight is achieving excellence in the primary user needs: functionality, reliability and usability. The user's goal was achieved and they received more value than they were expecting.
“That was easier/faster/better than I expected”
Surface delight are the details that accentuate an already usable experience. For example, consider the difference of receiving a free night stay at a great hotel experience vs. a poor one. This benefit is only of value if the hotel stay at least met your expectations. In user interface design, examples of surface delight could include:
Animations
Tactile transitions or gestural commands
Microcopy (i.e. injecting humor & slang, predicting users’ questions in advance)
Beautiful, relevant high-resolution imagery
Sound interactions
What are “User Expectations”?
Users are driven to act by their goals, whether consciously or not. When designing user experiences, it's crucial to understand not only these goals but also their expectations throughout the process. By grasping these expectations, we can better anticipate user desires, reference points, and criteria for satisfaction.
How do we know our user's expectations?
Along their journey to a goal, users may have varying numbers of expectations to account for. In order to know how many, and what expectations they have, we must be intentional about who exactly the user is and put ourselves in their shoes.
Activities to try:
Auditing existing experiences
Prototyping and testing
Triangulating research data
Competitive research
Gathering feedback directly from users
Where do expectations come from?
Users use your product with an intended goal and motivation in mind. Their expectations are based on a variety of past experience factors, such as:
Experiences with your product/service
Experiences with other products/services in similar categories, or achieves the same “job to be done”
Experiences with other websites in general (See Jakob’s Law)
How do expectations differ from needs?
User needs are the fundamental requirements for users to use your product or service. Not meeting those needs may cause the user disinterest, annoyance and even abandonment. Expectations, on the other hand, represent the standard that users uphold to continue using your product or service. They speaks to the user's beliefs and their desires, which may or may not be realistic. While addressing all user needs is crucial, considering expectations opens the door to user delight by moving beyond mere necessity.
Delight as a practice
1. Be aware of user expectations
Practice the user expectation and delight vocabulary when speaking about user decisions. User expectations are much more telling than user needs. “Needs” speak to a user's basic requirements, whereas “expectations” speak to a user's desires and beliefs, which enables more creative discussions.
Consider the following examples:
In _____ situation, what would _____ user expect?
How does that product decision align with what our users expect?
I don’t think this would meet our user's expectations, what can we do to make the experience more _____?
2. Expectations and user stories
“User stories” should be present in every spec so that teams can align on all of the various jobs to be done. By writing out all of the user expectations beforehand, it allows us to ensure that our user stories can be all-encompassing of the user's journey.
Consider the following:
Incorporate expectations into specs
Ex. Users have x expectation, therefore as user y, I must be able to do z
Use expectations to drive design strategic decisions
Use expectations when describing user problems and journeys
3. User expectation mapping
(Example: Starbucks Customer Journey Map)
Think of specific user types and their goals. Map out what are the important moments within their journey, document their expectations and where our product may/will fall on the expectations scale:
🙂 Meeting expectations
😍 Exceeding expectations
😰 Falling below expectations
Consider the following baseline expectations:
If auditing:
What is delightful about their current experience? (Exceeds expectations)
What is disappointing about their current experience (Below expectations)
If designing:
What can delight the user?
What could possibly be disappointing?
4. Design for emotion
(Example: Emotion wheel from the Junto Institute)
Humans are emotional beings, emotions can drive loyalty or disgust, let’s be intentional about what emotions we want to evoke. Let’s decide this as a team, hold ourselves accountable if decisions made compromise this original intent.
Consider the following:
If auditing:
How might users feel throughout the steps of their journey?
Identify the most impactful moments where users may be most vulnerable
If designing:
How might the user feel stepping into your experience?
How do we specifically want users to feel?
What emotions do we want to avoid evoking at all costs?
5. Prevent disappointments
Humans are heavily influenced by negativity bias, the idea that negative experiences stand out much more than positive experiences. In user experience, this translates to losing user trust and negative user sentiment (e.g. NPS Score, Customer Reviews, etc.). Anticipate user disappointments and address them early by understanding expectations and prioritizing efforts to meeting, if not exceeding those expectations.
Consider the following:
If auditing:
Identify critical moments of the user journey
Identify how our current experience may fall below the user's expectations
Work with the team on prioritizing the list of disappointments
If designing:
Identify critical moments of the user journey
Anticipate user disappointments, design around these possibilities
Gut check with peers or conduct testing to validate
6. Create the "concept car" for your product
No amount of data will tell us whether our ideas will truly delight our users, it is a very human experience that not just requires a deep level of empathy but also daring. I encourage designers to practice envisioning the future of their product space in the interest of delighting and exceeding our user's expectations. This will serve as an invaluable tool to rally teams behind ideas; it all starts with a concept.
If you've read this far, thank you for taking the time to hear my thoughts on creating delight. If you have any thoughts or questions, please feel free to reach out to me. Let's keep the discussion going.