When I started learning experience design, the emphasis on ensuring people could complete their tasks easily. We used phrases like ‘ease of use’. One of the influential books was Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things which identified all of the ineffective designs people experienced.
I had the chance to work on a great team with people like Tom Gomoll and Patricia Kelton who were leading the way toward creating delightful experiences, incorporating beautiful artwork and personality into our designs. Don Norman caught that wave, too with his book Emotional Design, Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things.
The tug of war between efficiency and delight continues today. Most CX books talk about delighting customers. A few, like Effortless Experience, encourage us to focus on efficiently satisfying customers rather than delighting them. So, which is right?
Maybe the old experience design phrase ‘Well, it depends’ applies here. It may actually be some of each.
Think about the phases of the customer journey. At some points in the journey, you may want to provide elements of delight that go beyond what the customer would expect. In other phases of the journey, the best thing might be to just deliver a satisfactory result as quickly and easily as possible.
When a person is having trouble doing a task with a product, they just want to find their answer and get back to work as quickly as possible. Here, the effortless experience applies. Help solve their problem in their channel of choice quickly. According to the effortless experience, going beyond that to delight may not provide any additional customer or business value. Consider making the shopping checkout process and service recovery/troubleshooting effortless.
To get new customers, word of mouth is helpful. And to get that, you need to have people telling stories about their experiences. People talk about the great product they are using or about a great experience they have had. Going beyond expectations & delivering delight will help. Consider delighting people during awareness, shopping, and product usage phases.
Thinking about the experiences you have built, what do you think? What is the right balance between delight and efficiency?
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