Great innovation doesn’t always bring the most delight.
Creating a delightful experience is a common goal amongst designers and brand managers. Yet, this sense of delight changes with the context of the brand, product and user. Tze talks about the different ways “delightfulness” changes, and how we can use it to design better things that people love.
Summary
- A sense of delight in a product is very contextual to the brand and to the user (e.g. a brand’s heritage, a brand’s story, a user’s localities or culture)
- Sometimes the delight factor isn’t always about being the most innovative—”Don’t drop the things that people love in pursuit of just newness”
- Even when a product or brand remains constant, the context of the cultures and ways of living change, which then changes what makes it delightful
- Understanding these contextual nuances are great reference points that designers can use as benchmarks and anchors for when experimenting and pushing innovation right to the fringes, so that we can make better design decisions and ask the right questions
Full Transcript
What people love in context of the cultures that they live in, the way they live their lives, that changes even though the brand is consistent, right?
DESIREE
Maybe you could help to define what this delightful factor is in product design. Yeah, how would you define what this delight is?
TZE
I think it is very contextual, right? It is contextual to the brand, and contextual to the user. Sometimes the reason why people love a brand is because of the heritage of the brand, the stories that the brands carry. And to throw that away, in pursuit of, you know, like being the most innovative out there, will alienate the core users from the brand.
So maybe that’s one aspect of like, don’t drop the things that people love in pursuit of just newness.
The other element is, I guess, contextual to users, scenarios, or localities, or culture. And that changes, right. So if you’re designing for a brand that’s global, what people love in context of the cultures that they live in, the way they live their lives, that changes even though the brand is consistent, right. Then the way that the offering is communicated, the way that whatever the brand is putting out in terms of its interaction and aesthetics, and everything, right, which constitutes the brand experience, has some nuances to it, which I think for us, it’s also fun to try and decode and understand and design for.
DESIREE
Would you say that these things, that if you identify in the context of the project, would you say these can be used as starting points for developing or creating a new idea or product?
TZE
Yeah, they can be starting points. But I think more often than not, we use them as reference points. Kind of like benchmarking. You know, like, because your starting point can be really far away, but then at some point, you say, okay, we need to benchmark it, or we need to have it grounded in certain elements. And then these become the checkpoints like, are we fulfilling these things, even though we’re pushing out?
So I think that’s where experimentation really is about pushing the starting point as far to the fringes as possible. And then we have these anchors within that framework to say like, hey, what are the things that people love? What are the things that resonate with brands? What are the things that make sense for cultural or trend related components? And then we use that as anchors to make better decisions or to ask questions.
THE STUCK IN DESIGN TEAM
Desiree Lim, Kevin Yeo, Matthew Wong