What it really means to “delight”
"トイレの的 a target on male toilets" by Yuya Tamai is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Of all the tired UX tropes, few are more somnambulant in this, the year of our lord 2024, than the notion of “occasionally surprising and delighting end users.”
It’s not that this sentiment isn’t something to which we should aspire. It’s that it is so often presented as some sort of design answer to Thomas Jefferson’s clause about the “pursuit of happiness.” Here is the highest plane of the discipline - some sort of nirvana ascended to after you do the right amount of user research and eat your Wheaties.
To me at least, this is all a matter of orientation within the design community. We throw that “delight” word around far too much. Aaron Walter’s pyramid of user needs isn’t wrong. But when we view pleasure and delight as something we are move toward as opposed to something we strive for in the rarer moments, we rob attention from how important and how hard it is to make something functional, reliable, and usable.
So, yeah, if you’re asking my opinion, I’d like to hear a lot less of that word over the next decade or so than I have over the last. And I’d also like for us to remember what it really means and what its place is in the design profession.
Just before the end of last year, I read Naohiro Matsumura’s book Shikake: The Japanese Art of Shaping Behavior Through Design. Matsumura is an academic, and in quite academic fashion, he proposes a whole new field of research (“Shikakeology”) around designs that uses innate behavioral triggers to nudge people toward positive change. This is in opposition to, well, however else we might do it currently, whether that be scare tactics, shaming, or direct appeals to our better nature.
Matsumura might well be on his way to a new field of study, but as I thumbed through his many, meticulous examples of “shikake,” I kept coming back to that word delight. The thing Matsumura recognizes, and illustrates so well, is how subconscious and, yes, often fleeting delight is.
We, us users, don’t always need delight. Often, we want to pay the bills or book a table at a restaurant and just be done with it as quickly as possible. The delight comes when we don’t have to do anything your app or website. Even when that’s not the case - when we might just go for a little bit of it - we sure as shit don’t want to be aware of it as it is happening. At the very best, we might look back and marvel or just appreciate it after the fact.
Delight in the field of experience design isn’t like it is at, say, the cinema. You aren’t there to know you’re having a good time. The good time and the good thing may never even feel connected.
One of Matsumura’s most memorable examples of “shikake” are tiny bullseyes placed in mens’ urinals. Here is a delightful experience (trust me on this one, ladies) with no obvious connection whatsoever to its good outcome: vastly cleaner public restrooms.
Indeed, what’s so striking to me about this example of “delight” is how disposable it is. People take aim for a minute. Then they walk away, wash their hands and leave. The cumulative effect is that fewer resources are needed at less frequent intervals to take care of a bathroom. A bunch of highly disposable “delights” add up to something quite durable: a more functional, reliable, and usable bathroom.
The pyramid of user needs isn’t something for us to scale. It’s a North Star for proportion and emphasis.