3 Easy Pointers to Keep In Mind While Creating Delight Through User Experience

Get the Mental Model right

Mental Models are essentially set of best practices in understanding users’ reason for doing things. Designing around it will create delight

While Aesthetics play a big role in the immediate impression might be very important as a “buying” feature, often it will fail as a “using” feature if not done in the mental model for a given customer context or usage scenario.

Good book on the topic is Indi Young’s Mental Models –Aligning Design Strategy with User Behavior

Here is a summary blog post for the topic – Getting Mental Models Right – CrazyEggblogpost

“Nobody is complaining” – that doesn’t mean there is no problem

User adaptability is surprisingly high when it comes to dealing with inefficiencies.
A high tech enterprise software product (especially ERP) takes 6 months and 1 M$ to learn and operationalize, TV remote has 84 buttons on it, the latest microwave oven can cook food in 101 styles (didn’t know there were 100 ways to cook idli!) etc. and yet after a while USERS ADAPT. They compromise & accept the product with its inherent inefficiencies until someone comes around and solves it (think Apple!)

A good Product Manager and User Experience Designer will uncover those inherent inefficiencies and create opportunities to simplify things, bringing the “aha” moment with less capabilities!

One of the roadmap prioritization techniques we advocate as part of our Customer Insights courses at the Institute is Kano Analysis which basically suggests that every product has basic attributes, performance features and delighting features. Most successful product releases will have atleast a few “delighters”