People aren’t loyal to products because they’re delightful.
People are loyal to products that work. Products that solve their problem better than the alternatives. Have you seen Craigslist? Nothing delightful whatsoever (unless you find true love in the missed connections, maybe). But it’s up and running because it works really well. People needed a way to buy and sell secondhand items. Thrift shops were too random and eBay wasn’t local. Craigslist found an opportunity and did one thing really well.
But as the internet evolved and social media took over, anonymity wasn’t the norm anymore. It became suspicious and risky. So Facebook marketplace stepped into the scene. They found a way to accomplish the same local buy & sell concept but solved for the increasing discomfort of total strangers.
People didn’t switch to Facebook because it was more delightful. They switched because it solved a problem — needing to buy & sell locally — better than the alternative, Craigslist.
People are loyal to products that solve their problems better than the alternatives.
And the bigger the problem, the less delight matters. If you need a bed out of your apartment before the lease ends, you don’t care about fun. You care about getting the bed gone.
And there’s an inflection point too. When the problem becomes urgent, delight works against the user experience. If you’re paying bills, navigating to a hospital, or trying to find test results, delight gets in the way. The higher the stakes, the more focused users are on the problem and the less they care about brand loyalty.
People will never care about a product as much as they care about solving their problem. As designers, we don’t need to make users love our product to be successful. We need to make a product that works so well people keep coming back.
Delight isn’t just irrelevant, it’s harmful.
If your product works really well, delightful experiences can make a good experience better, occasionally. But not by much.
Remember the paper clip Clippy in the original Word? He may have made you smile, but wasn’t the reason you chose Word over pencil & paper. And in the process, he introduced new issues. He covered up buttons, you had to learn how to disable him to turn it off, and he interrupted your task with questions. And for users that weren’t native speakers, could they tell the jokes from the urgent messages? How did adaptive devices interact with those messages? What about cultures where personifying office stationery was offensive, unusual, or uncomfortable?
Delight is really, really hard to get right. And really, really easy to get wrong.
Localizing plain language is tricky enough, but localizing delight? How do you ensure that the emotion you're conveying in English translates into the same emotion every time the text changes?
Delight is personal, and circumstantial. While balloons could be welcome if your Facebook memories remind you of the best part of your year, they wouldn’t land so hot if your year was terrible. (Facebook apologizes over “cruel” Year in Review clips).
To convey delight across an international product and get the circumstances just right is arguably impossible, so why risk it?
People don’t stay loyal to products because they’re delightful.
Adding delight is cheaper than solving problems, in the short term.
I don’t know the numbers, but that’s the best reasoning I’ve extrapolated. Which is why it feels so important to emphasize emphasize the dollar signs that come with a focus on functionality and accessibility. Solving the problem may be hard, but it’s the only sure-fire way to create genuine product loyalty.
The quest for delight doesn’t affect all products equally, either. If your product is a streaming service, delight showing up at the wrong time could be frustrating, but it’s not likely to cause harm. But if your product provides health, finance, or safety information? A miscalculate delight attempt could be life or death. And while tech started as a form of entertainment, it’s now interwoven into our daily lives. And chances are high that if you work in UX, your product that is tied to a users’ livelihood.
Just skip it
Take “delight” it out of your design principles. For sure, take it out of your portfolio. Make sure your design speaks to functionality first. Add tighter parameters about when delight could be okay, and when it’s not. When you’re asked about it, emphasize your ability to find alternatives for solving the problem they’re using delight to solve. Discoverability, enthusiasm, loyalty — it can all be solved by stronger design, and it will always be threatened by delight.
