The delicate balance of delight and satisfaction

Delight without satisfaction is addiction. And so when we design to make people feel happy in the moment, we must be mindful that it also enhances their long-term happiness, or risk creating a suboptimal world.

Over the weekend, designer Taurean Bryant posted about his hatred for the term “delight” in design. And Justin Maxwell shared an anecdote about the Mint.com team being bewildered by “Design for Delight” as an OKR at Intuit after they were acquired. Yet given the option, I think we’d all prefer a delightful experience. So why the dissonance?

Let’s start by defining terms. Generally, hedonic psychologists think of happiness as made up of two parts: delight (a momentary experience; I often think of the first lick of an ice cream cone) and satisfaction (a long-term experience; I imagine myself watching my sleeping son, thinking my life is good).

One of the oddities of hedonics is that the two don’t correlate particularly strongly. In studies where people are randomly pinged to rate their in-the-moment delight and then asked about their satisfaction at the end of the day, the two emerge as distinct: some have many moments of delight but are highly unsatisfied, while others aren’t particularly delighted but very satisfied generally (I may be a strong outlier in this category).

Since they are distinct, the perfect product would both delight and satisfy me. But that is hard to achieve and so design leaders frequently pronounce edicts about what they perceive as the deficit. I have no doubt that some well-meaning Intuit leader thought “Well, our product is very satisfying but not particularly delightful, so let’s lean into introducing more delightful moments.”

Which makes sense, as long as it is contextualized. In general, I don’t buy Intuit products to be delighted; I have Netflix for that. I just want to file my taxes so I can be satisfied. So what Intuit really wants is to be maximally satisfying and delightful enough. The result would be an app that files my taxes correctly and doesn’t make me totally hate the in-the-moment experience.

That is a cohesive, achievable design strategy. You can say that finishing filing your taxes and having them accepted is the satisfying behavior and advancing to the next screen is the delightful behavior, then divide your team to focus on designs that maximize the rate of each. In the event of conflicting needs, filing your taxes wins.

The converse is true for Netflix: be maximally delightful and satisfying enough. The result is an entertainment experience that also, on occasion, makes me reflect on some of the deeper truths of my life. Again, those are differing behaviors that can be designed for separately.

Because in reality, the problem isn’t with the introduction of delight into design, but rather a misunderstanding of when and why it matters. Every product needs both but can only maximize one, so they have to be viewed and communicated by leaders as a tradeoff of both resources and features.