Notes from the Design for Delight workshop

Last Sunday, I attended a workshop on Design for Delight by Jared M. Spool and Dana Chisnell as a part of UX Thailand Conference 2019.

A good design is usable, useful, and effective. A great design delights its users.

Throughout the day, Jared and Dana introduced a framework to bring delight to users and customers by introducing pleasure, flow, and meaning through your work.

Attendees presenting their ideas for a design exercise on creating a banking system for people in poverty.

Part 1: The Kano Model

The Kano Model, created by Noriaki Kano, can be used to answer how much investment it takes for a company to increase customer satisfaction.

There are 3 categories of preferences. Each can be plotted as a trend on a chart with an investment axis (inexpensive to expensive) and a satisfaction axis (frustration to delight).

The Kano Model measures how much investment is needed to increase customer satisfaction.

1. Performance Pay-offs

• The more features we add, the better the product becomes.
• This can lead to the Experience Rot where we see more features, higher complexity, but a worse user experience.
• There are two ways to deal with Performance Pay-offs. One is to take existing features out, and the other is to not add them in the first place.
• Disadvantage of Performance Pay-offs: Competitors can see which features users are using in your products, then create a simpler version with just those selected features.

2. Basic Expectations

• Creating only the things users expect from our product.
• Users expect these expectations to happen and if they don’t, users get really frustrated.
• Example: Despite being able to deliver a powerful tool with fancy features, Invision Studio lacked a good file system which is one of the user’s basic expectations.
• If you hit all expectations, no one will praise it. But if you miss it, everyone will talk about it (in a bad way!).
• These products causes Neutral Satisfaction — Designs that are “Edible but not Delicious.”

3. Excitement Generators

• The Delighters that go beyond user expectations.
• There are 3 approaches to creating Delighters: Pleasure, Flow, and Meaning.
• Pleasure: Exceeding user’s expectations (does not need to be expensive!). This can be done through simple methods such as using clean language or understanding what people’s questions are and having information to answer those questions.
• Flow: Making things faster, simpler by reducing the number of steps for the user to complete a task. (Removing friction)
• Meaning: Building something into the product that allows them to make somebody else delightful. For example: TOMS- When you buy a pair of shoes, they also give a pair to underprivileged children in developing countries.

When you hit the expectations (basic expectations), the design disappears. When it exceeds (excitement generators), the design is visible again.

Delighters eventually become basic expectations when the expectation level increases. The bar can be set low or high, depending on each individual user.

As delighters become expectations, we need to find new ways to delight them by:

1. Compete on Cost: Lower cost than our competitors
2. Compete on Quality: Charge more money for delivering a great service. Examples include luxury brands like Apple and Tesla.

Competing on quality requires you to always look for new ways to delight your customers. The problem with Innovation Labs is that they are too busy inventing that they don’t get to talk to their users.

Designing for delight is a requirement, not an optional thing.

Part 2: Designing for Pleasure

Despicable design creates emerging principles which can be used for future design decisions.

• Despicable design is a framework which starts by looking at the negative in order to define principles that helps us design for the positive.
• Makes our process more inclusive: By focusing on how bad we can make something, people are not as judgmental. People then become more comfortable in designing for the better.
• Creates Emerging Principles: Future design rationales for future decisions.
• Principles aren’t helpful if you just come up with them in a conference room. Despicable design encourages conversation around the rules, not the work itself.
• An alternative way to conduct despicable design is to start from the current, the negative, then the positive.
• A good way to define metrics is by asking what would get people excited and what would get them frustrated.

As part of the activity, we were asked to rephrase a few sentences from a banking page using the negative words that were opposite from our positive branding ones.

Part 3: Creating a Better Flow

Method 1: Reduce tool-time and increase goal time

Time in a user flow can be categorized into goal time and tool time.

To create a better flow, we need to increase the goal time and reduce the tool time.

• Goal time: The time user spends thinking about their goal. Value is added to their experience. Example: Looking for fun destinations when planning for a vacation.
• Tool time: The time users had to spend without making any value. Example: Typing the same credit card information for every single reservation.
• We want to look for tool time and try to eliminate them. Users may also compensate for tool time by making their own tools.
• When we introduce a new version of our product, we should aim to create Embraceable Change where users are happy to accept the changes and feel like they have control over it. Users don’t like it when they can’t do the things they do all the time anymore without having a choice.

Method 2: Bridge the gap between current knowledge and target knowledge

To make our product intuitive, we want to reduce the gap between current and target knowledge.

Magic Escalator of Acquired Knowledge (MEOAK)

• Current knowledge: What users know when they encounter your design.
• Target knowledge: Information they need to know in order to get things done.

We can design to close the gap between current and target knowledge by:

1. Training: Increase current knowledge
2. Simplify: Bring target knowledge down

Training is a continuous cost, but simplification is a one-time effort.

When target and current knowledge are too far apart, the product is not intuitive. A product is intuitive when users don’t feel like they’re being taught.

We should aim for Plain Interaction: The fewest possible steps with maximum focus on the user’s immediate next interaction.

Journey maps can be used to map out the flow and see whether an activity is frustrating or delightful.

When dealing with constraints, check if the constraints are real (limited by an actual law) or if it’s just a way things have always been done.

Part 4: Meaning is measured through stories

The Back-Up Question

Let’s say whatever we build is going to be amazing. Think about the next 5 or 10 years from now.

What changed in our user’s lives because they used our product?

How did this changed them and the people around them?

What is it that had such an amazing impact on their lives?

What stories would they tell others to convince them to use our product?

The answers to these questions create the vision or value statement of our product. We then back up and figure how we can create that experience over the years.

Reflection

I believe this workshop is highly relevant and useful for the UX community in Thailand. Design for delight encourages us to think of user experience beyond the terms of usability. The Kano Model relates customer satisfaction to investment, which is what most stakeholders care about. This can be a great talking point when we want to gain buy-in from business. Additionally, despicable design allows an environment where non-designers can get involved in the design process.

By using some of the content and activities introduced in this workshop, I believe we can leverage the importance of user experience design in our organizations. We can emphasize the impact of UX at a higher level. UX is not just about the user interface or pixels, it is the vision of a product.

Lastly, due to capacity limits, not everyone was able to attend the workshop of their choice. It is important for us as a collective to share our learnings and spread the knowledge for the benefits of our community.

Thank you Jared and Dana for sharing your expertise and thank you UX Thailand staff, volunteers, and attendees for making the event possible.

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