Design For Delight
As designers, our job is to communicate ideas effectively. For every
particular message, we create a context in which the message would work
best, guiding users to achieving their tasks, gaining their trust or convincing
them of whatever we’re communicating. Of course, there are endless ways
to create this context. One of them is to design for visual aesthetics,
surprise, joy, happiness — design for delight; design to be memorable and
remarkable.
Attractive things work better and help focus and keep the user’s attention.
Memorable design increases excitement for products and brands, leading
to increased engagement. In fact, a strong, reliable emotional relationship
between your clients and their audience could be the best thing that ever
happens to your career.
Although the vast majority of brands are still silent, passive and impersonal,
we’ve observed more websites trying hard to engage our senses, whether
through a strong aesthetic appeal, through witty animations in the content
block or simply through a little extra attention to small design elements on
the “About” page. Such designs are beautiful to look at, fun to navigate but,
most importantly, memorable — for the simple reason that they are
different. By adding delightful personal touches to your designs, you stand
out from the crowd and give visitors something to talk about and share
with friends and colleagues. And that’s a good start.
You can elicit delight in a variety of settings: on your maintenance mode
page, on the 404 error page, in your pre-loader, and everywhere else. The
idea is to surprise visitors by giving them something pleasant to talk about.