What is user experience? Many people believe that user experience is all about usability (how a product works). But actually UX is lot more than “ability to use” something, UX is all about feelings. The emotional relationship is what you layer on top of usability in order to create a pleasurable user experience.

User experience isn’t usability — it’s a feeling

“Delight” is a word that we are hearing more of to describe pleasurable moments in our products. Delight is a magic that makes us fall in love with a product. It’s a core element to strive for when designing. In this article I will share a few tips to get you focused on creating really amusing and exciting experience for your users.

Designing For Delight is Designing For Moments

Designing for delight is all about establishing an emotional connection with your users and reminding them that there are real humans behind the design.

Below is 5 tips for delighting users with great UX:

1. Tailored Experience

A critical component to creating an excellent user experience inside your app is personalized content. Users want their experiences to be just for them when they visit your site or launch your app.

Examples: Consider some of the most visited sites and services in the world and how they use personalization. For example, Amazon offers shopping recommendations based on purchases and viewed items.

Amazon.com offered individualized suggestions based on past purchases and browsing behaviors.

YouTube is another good example of personalization. On YouTube’s app home screen, you can see personalizes content which is based on videos you’ve previously watched. In contrast to headlining the personalization that Amazon does, YouTube app provides content without calling attention to the fact that’s recommended. ![](/content/images/2016/12/2.png) Not only app or site content required personalization — push notifications should also contain *personalized* and *relevant information*. Netflix is a great example of *pushing the value*. Rather than sending every user a notification every time any new show or season is released, Netflix understands the specific shows that each user has been watching, and only sends a notification to a user when one of their favorite shows has a new season available. ![](/content/images/2016/12/3.png)

Netflix uses push notifications to let users know when their favorite shows are available

##2. Brand Personality Showing personality in your app or site can be a very powerful way for your audience to identify and empathize with you. As Aarron Walter said in his book Designing for Emotion, “Personality is the mysterious force that attracts us to certain people and repels us from others.”

Example: Let’s take a MailChimp case for inspiration. MailChimp rewards users for deploying and scheduling their first e-mails by adding humor throughout the process. Why? Because MailChimp understands that getting to this point in the process is no easy feat, but by adding these small and delightful surprises throughout the user journey, MailChimp makes sending e-mails less stressful and a lot more fun.

If you’ve ever deployed an email campaign, you understand the stress that accompanies pushing Send button, but MailChimp introduces a bit of humor to lighten things up.

##3. Animation Animation may be used in a wide range of scales and contexts to unite beauty and function. Of course, animation needs to be [functional](http://babich.biz/how-to-use-animation-to-improve-ux/) above all else, but as was said before, humans are emotional and focus on user emotions is essential, because they play a huge role in user interactions.

Use animation as an opportunity to:

Make your interfaces feel more alive

Animations can surprise. Credits: tubikstudio

Grab the user’s attention
Help user recover from unexpected error

Empty state is a pleasant surprise. Credits: Material Design

Example: Photojojo, an e-commerce store for photography accessories creates a memorable and fun shopping experience. The site is full of delightful surprises that are user initiated and part of the user journey. For example, there’s a lever titled “DO NOT PULL.” When you pull it (and I’m sure you’ll do it) an animated hand comes from the top and takes you to the product details.

Photojojo is rewarding users with a unexpected smile. Credits: uxmag

4. Audio Feedback

The design industry has always focused primarily on the visual experience but we tend to forget that the auditory experience is just as important to the user experience:

Audio can also be beneficial in providing useful feedback.
Designing with audio allows for greater personalisation of a product.

Example: Clear, a to-do app plays a twinkling bell sound when you tick off a completed task, making the achievement feel that little bit better. Not only does it give the product a human touch, it also conveys a brand’s personality in ways that visual cues are not able to.

How Clear Works

5. Reduce the Obstacles

Reducing obstacles is about minimizing pain points and frustration that users may experience throughout their journey. Empathy is key: you should anticipate user’s questions, identify moments of anxiety and use them as an opportunity to delight user.

Example: Whilst ‘not to auto-tweet’ might be taken for granted by good marketers when asking for twitter connections, the user is less than sure. Microcopy from Timely covers all the potential user concerns in one tight little sentence.

Whilst ‘not to auto-tweet’ might be taken for granted by good marketers when asking for twitter connections, the user is less than sure.

Conclusion

Never underestimate the power of delight to improve the users’ experience. Delight isn’t about your product, it’s actually about your user. It’s not a feature, it’s an emotion. Make your app a joy to use by connecting feelings with features!

Thank you!