Maybe the squirrel gives me a deeper sense of Zappos’ personality, but my delight as a customer comes from free overnight shipping, a massive selection of shoes, and VIP treatment without judgment when I return a lot of what I order. Truly meaningful emotional connection requires more than a sprinkling of emotional delighters.
Zappos isn’t the only site peppering their experience with delighters. A visit to the “Things I want page” on shopping site Wanelo triggers a rainstorm of spinning cat heads (often wearing bow ties). Refreshing your list of options in the Yelp app produces an animation of a rocket ship launching.
Some of these additions make us smile or laugh, some annoy us or feel cheesy, but this is the kind of stuff that passes as delight online. Delight should be more and do more.
I work at Intuit, where we’re looking to create emotional connections in tax preparation, personal finance, and accounting. As you might imagine, these domains require delight to have a greater sophistication and deeper resonance than many of the superficial delighters that exist in consumer apps.
It’s no secret among designers that if you create an experience that connects with users on an emotional level, you’ve succeeded. Emotion is what makes an experience an experience. Emotional reactions create bonds between users and products, signifying that they are experiencing something memorable.
So, the question isn’t if emotional connection is important, it’s how to do it—and how to do it well. At Intuit, we believe doing it well means thinking of emotion as something core, not separate from, the functional benefits of our products.
For more of O’Grady’s article, go here.
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