Context: If you haven’t read my first post in this series, check out Day #1: The First Pancake Principle. This will give you the backstory needed, and prepare you for the unexpected snail.
Day #3
My bet is you’ll be able to recall the first two “rejected design principles” better because they’re anchored in a slightly unexpected narrative, visual, or story.
All products tell stories. They introduce themselves, establish a personality (brand), sell a problem and a solution to something, explain a set of new terms or tools, and then guide us through some tasks before delivering value. This hopefully kicks off a long, virtuous cycle of value exchange.
Delight is memorable because it breaks that familiar storyline. It’s a gentle little surprise that peeks over the expected, allows us to leave what we remember behind, and really notice the new experience before us.
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Let me hit you with an example;
In 2015, I was leading design at Level Money, a personal finance app similar to Mint. Our users needed to connect their bank accounts so we could help them manage their spending, and sometimes the bank connection process lagged. If it was taking awhile, the team designed a little animated snail to slide in from the left and scoot, scoot, scoot across the bottom of the bank connection screen.
It was concerning incredible how many of our testimonials and positive reviews mentioned the snail, both because it implied bank connect was slow AF and because users weren’t raving about our many meticulously implemented savings features. (a**holes...) They remembered the snail.
It kindly entertained our users in a moment of slowness, but also said “You know that banking story you brought to this product? How you expected this to go? The stress you’re feeling because you need to get your spending under control? Yeeeaah, that’s not our vibe.”
And the snail was just the first delightful surprise. Most personal finance apps were green, so we were orange. Their ads said “Save for tomorrow,” and ours said “Life is not about money.” They spouted grand aspirations like following your passion, providing for your kids, and going back to college, while Level Money focused on smaller, tangible wins like buying the good coffee or fixing your cracked phone screen.
And it worked all the way to a successful acquisition, because we made ourselves memorable.
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Good designers know what story their would-be-users expect, and just do that story better. But great designers wrap their products in a delightfully unexpected story that users won’t forget. One they want to talk about. That has them curious enough to open your emails, paying attention to your retargeted ads, and coming back to your beautifully designed work again and again.
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