Exploring Emotional Design for Delightful Products

BONUS: Nesrine Changuel shares how to create emotionally connected, delightful products!

In this BONUS episode, we explore the concept of product delight with Nesrine Changuel. Nesrine shares insights from her extensive experience at companies like Skype, Spotify, Google Meet, and Chrome to help us understand how to create lovable tech experiences that drive user loyalty and differentiation. We explore the Delight Grid Framework she created, and discuss the importance of emotional connection in product design. We also touch on practical ways to incorporate delight into everyday product decisions.

The Essence of Delight in Products

"Creating emotional connection between users and products... What I'm usually vocal about is that it's not enough to solve functional needs if you want to create sustainable growth, and more particularly if you want to have your users love the product and create habits using your product."

Nesrine explains that while most companies know how to solve functional problems, truly delightful products go beyond functionality to create emotional connections with users. This connection comes from anticipating user needs and surprising them on both functional and emotional levels. She emphasizes that delight emerges when users experience both joy and surprise simultaneously, which is key to exceeding expectations and building brand loyalty.

Moving Beyond User Complaints

"Most features that are built in products are coming from users' complaints... What I'm trying to be clear about is that if you want to build an emotional connection, it's about opening up a little bit more of your source of opportunities."

Many teams focus primarily on addressing user complaints, which puts them in a reactive position. Nesrine encourages organizations to anticipate user needs by engaging with users in comfortable environments before problems arise. She suggests looking beyond direct feature requests and investigating how users feel while using the product, how they experience the journey, and what emotions arise during the experience. This proactive approach opens new opportunities for creating delightful experiences that users may not explicitly request.

In this segment we refer to the KANO model for categorizing product features.

Understanding Emotional Demotivators: The Zoom Fatigue Example

"I tried to interview many users and realized that, of course, with the fact that we all moved into video conferencing, some demotivators started to surface like boredom, low interaction, overwhelm. There was a term that started to show up at the time - it's called zoom fatigue."

Nesrine shares how her team at Google Meet tackled emotional demotivators by first deeply understanding them. By investigating "Zoom fatigue," they discovered through Stanford research that one major cause was the fatigue from constantly seeing yourself on screen. This insight led them to develop the "minimize self view" feature, allowing users to broadcast their video without seeing themselves. This example demonstrates how understanding emotional pain points can lead to features that create delight by addressing unspoken needs.

The Delight Grid Framework

"We want to delight the users, but because we don't know how, we end up only doing performers or hygiene features."

Nesrine introduces her Delight Grid Framework, which helps product teams balance functional and emotional needs. The framework begins by identifying emotional motivators through empathetic user research. These motivators are then placed in a grid alongside functional needs to classify features as:

• Low Delight: Features that only solve functional needs

• Surface Delight: Features that only address emotional needs (like celebratory animations)

• Deep Delight: Features that solve both functional needs and emotional motivators

She emphasizes that the most successful products prioritize deep delight features, which create lasting emotional connections while solving real problems.

Detecting Opportunities Through User Journey Mapping

"I use customer journey maps... One of the elements is feelings... If you do the exercise very well and put the feeling element into your journey map, you can draw a line showing peak moments and valley moments - these are pivotal moments for connecting with users at the emotional level."

Nesrine advocates for using customer journey maps to identify emotional highs and lows throughout the user experience. By focusing on these "pivotal moments," teams can find opportunities to amplify positive emotions or transform negative ones into delightful experiences. She encourages teams to celebrate positive emotional peaks with users and find ways to turn valleys into more positive experiences.

Real-World Example: Restaurant QR Code Payment

"The waiter came with a note, and on the note, there is a QR code... What a relief that experience was! I've been very, very surprised, and they turned that moment of frustration and fear into something super fun."

Nesrine shares a delightful dining experience where a restaurant transformed the typically frustrating moment of splitting the bill by providing a QR code that led to an app where diners could easily select what they ordered and pay individually. This example illustrates how identifying emotional pain points (bill-splitting anxiety) and addressing them can turn a negative experience into a memorable, delightful one that creates loyal customers.

Creating a Culture of Delight Across Teams

"It's very important to have the same language. If the marketing team believes in emotional connection, and the designer believes in emotional connection, and then suddenly engineers and PMs don't even know what you're talking about, that creates a gap."

For delight to become central to product development, Nesrine emphasizes the importance of creating a shared language and understanding across all teams. This shared vision ensures everyone from designers to engineers is aligned on the goal of creating emotionally connected experiences, allowing for better collaboration and more cohesive product development.

Recommended Reading

• Nesrine refers us to Emotional Design by Don Norman

• Designing for emotion, by Aaron Walter

• And Dan Olsen’s The Lean Product Playbook

About Nesrine Changuel

Nesrine Changuel is a product leader, coach, and author with over a decade of experience at Skype, Spotify, Google Meet, and Chrome. She specializes in designing emotionally connected, delightful products. Her book, Delight, introduces a framework for creating lovable tech experiences that drive user loyalty and differentiation.

You can link with Nesrine Changuel on LinkedIn and follow Nesrine’s website.