Most products today work: they let us order food, join a video call, or listen to music without too much trouble. But very few products are truly loved. Loved products don’t just function, they create an emotional spark. They surprise us, comfort us, or make us feel a little better about ourselves.
That spark is what product leader Nesrine Changuel calls product delight. Having worked on globally known products like Skype, Spotify, and Google Meet, she’s seen first-hand how the most successful teams intentionally build emotional connection into their products. And she insists: delight isn’t a “nice extra.” It’s a competitive necessity.
This article breaks down her thinking into practical lessons. By the end, you’ll know how to identify moments of delight, design for them, and avoid the common traps that make delight feel like decoration instead of differentiation.
If you only have time to read this
Loved products make people feel something. Product leader Nesrine Changuel calls this product delight: the combination of joy and surprise at moments that matter.
In this article, you’ll find:
- A simple definition of product delight and why it’s a competitive necessity.
- The three pillars of delight: removing friction, anticipating needs, and exceeding expectations.
- Practical stories from Revolut, Spotify, Uber, and more to show how delight works in practice.
- Tools like the Delight Grid and the 50/40/10 rule to help balance functional and emotional value in your roadmap.
- Four proven “delighters” (personalisation, celebration, seasonality, and humanisation) that you can adapt to your own product.
- A reminder that delight is a mindset and a culture that drives loyalty and sets products apart.
If you have time to read further, the full article breaks down each concept in detail and shows you how to turn delight into something actionable in your product.
What is Product Delight?
Product delight happens when joy and surprise meet. It’s the moment a product works better than expected, or makes us feel understood in a way we didn’t anticipate.
Think about your favourite product. Maybe it’s an app that just works every time. Or maybe it’s something more emotional: a playlist that lifts your mood, or a service that makes you feel cared for. The point is that delight doesn’t come from function alone. We connect with products both functionally (what they do) and emotionally (how they make us feel).
For years, marketers and designers have talked about emotional connection. Product teams, on the other hand, often focus only on metrics and features. Delight bridges this gap: it turns a product from something useful into something people remember and want to return to.
The three pillars of delight
According to Nesrine, delight isn’t magic. It can be built deliberately by focusing on three pillars:
- Remove friction
Delight doesn’t only come from flashy features, it starts with reducing frustration in key moments. Think of splitting a bill with friends: usually awkward, sometimes stressful. One restaurant turned it into a smooth experience with a simple QR code system that let everyone pay their share seamlessly. A moment of friction turned into a surprisingly pleasant experience.
- Anticipate needs
Users won’t always tell you what they need next, and by the time they do, it’s often too late to surprise them. Delight comes when you know them well enough to act first. For example, Revolut recognised that many of its users are travellers. Instead of waiting for complaints about roaming fees, it introduced an in-app option to set up an eSIM on arrival. A small feature, but one that solved a problem before users even asked.
- Exceed expectations
Sometimes delight means going beyond the expected in moments of stress. Picture an Uber driver cancelling at the last minute while you’re rushing to catch a train. Frustrating, right? Now imagine opening the app and finding that your refund was processed instantly in just two taps. What could have been a sour experience turns into reassurance and trust.
These three pillars show that delight isn’t about decoration. It’s about being intentional: fixing the low points, spotting needs early, and adding just enough extra to make people feel cared for.
From insight to action: the Delight Model
Understanding delight is one thing. Building it into your roadmap is another. To make it practical, Nesrine developed what she calls the Delight Model: a simple way to move from user insight to concrete product decisions.
It starts with motivators. Why do people come to your product in the first place? Some motivators are functional: find a song, book a ticket, send a message. Others are emotional: feel less lonely, express myself, relax after a long day. Both matter.
Once you’ve mapped motivators, you can explore opportunities:
- If people want to feel connected, how might we make sharing easier?
- If they want efficiency, how might we remove two clicks from this flow?
From there, brainstorm solutions, but don’t stop at good ideas. Test them against the Delight Grid, a simple tool that shows whether your idea hits functional needs, emotional needs, or both:
- Low Delight → solves a functional motivator only. Example: Spotify improving search so users can find songs by lyrics.
- Surface Delight → serves an emotional motivator only. Example: Spotify Wrapped, no real function, but pure emotional connection.
- Deep Delight → combines both. Example: Spotify’s Discover Weekly, which delivers on the function of discovering new music while also giving the emotional thrill of personalisation.
The grid helps teams see where each feature sits and build a balanced mix of functional and emotional value.
The 50/40/10 rule
Even with the grid, it’s tempting to lean too far in one direction. Too many “surface” delights, and you end up with confetti on top of broken flows. Too many “low” delights, and you deliver a competent but forgettable product.
That’s why Nesrine suggests the 50/40/10 rule:
Nesrine Changuel. nesrine-changuel.com
- 50% Low Delight: the basics. Search, login, payments. These must work.
- 40% Deep Delight: where real differentiation happens. Features that deliver both function and feeling.
- 10% Surface Delight: the little moments of joy that make a product human.
This mix ensures your roadmap covers the essentials while still creating memorable experiences. It’s not a hard law, but a reminder: your product should feel like a bouquet of colours, not a wall of grey or a cloud of glitter.
Examples of delighters that work
Delight can sound abstract until you see it in action. Nesrine points to a few patterns that consistently create emotional connection across very different products. Think of them as “delighter ingredients” you can sprinkle in the right moments.
1. Personalisation
Nothing feels colder than being treated like a number. That’s why people smile when their name is written on a coffee cup, even if it’s sometimes misspelled. In digital products, personalisation goes far beyond names. Spotify’s personalised playlists or Netflix’s recommendations work because they reflect you. They save you time, but more importantly, they make you feel seen.
2. Celebration
Humans love recognition. When Airbnb celebrates a host maintaining “Superhost” status with a little burst of confetti in the app, it transforms a metric into a meaningful moment. Celebrations work best at genuine peaks in the journey: a major milestone achieved, a goal reached, an effort rewarded. They remind people that their work matters.
3. Seasonality
A product that changes with the seasons feels alive. At Google Meet, Nesrine’s team experimented with seasonal backgrounds, from Diwali to Christmas to the Olympics. These small touches created curiosity and freshness, encouraging users to explore features they might otherwise ignore. Seasonality works because it connects the product to the rhythms of real life.
4. Humanisation
The most surprising delighters often come from asking: “What if this product were a person?” Dyson famously compares its vacuum cleaners not to competitors but to hiring someone to clean your home. That shift inspired features that made the product feel more helpful, more human. Similarly, Google Meet added gestures like “raise hand” or emoji reactions to make remote meetings feel closer to being in the same room.
Risks of overdoing delight
Delight is powerful, but it can backfire if it’s forced or misplaced. When teams get too excited about “surprising” users, they sometimes forget that not all surprises are welcome.
One example comes from Deliveroo in France. On Mother’s Day, the company sent a push notification designed to look like a missed call from your mom. Tap on it, and you’d be reminded to order flowers through their service. The intention was light-hearted, but the reaction wasn’t.
The lesson is clear: delight must always be inclusive and sensitive, as what feels joyful to one group may feel exclusionary, trivialising, or even hurtful to another.
There’s another, more subtle risk: using delight as a distraction. Confetti animations or seasonal gimmicks won’t hide the frustration of a buggy checkout or a broken onboarding flow. In fact, they can make the problem feel worse, as if the company cares more about polish than fixing what really matters.
Delight works best when the basics already run smoothly and the extra touch feels like an act of care, not like a cover-up.
Measuring delight
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it, right? The tricky part with delight is that it isn’t always visible in next week’s numbers. But that doesn’t mean it’s immeasurable. You just need to look at it from two angles:
1. Immediate signals
These are the quick indicators that tell you if people feel good in the moment. Surveys like CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), NPS (Net Promoter Score), or lightweight pulse checks after a key action can capture the emotional response. Google even developed a method called HATS (for Happiness Tracking Survey) to measure user happiness over time with simple questions repeated often enough to spot trends.
2. Long-term impact
The deeper value of delight shows up over months, not days. Emotionally connected users are more likely to stay, recommend, and spend. Studies by McKinsey and Harvard Business Review found that users who feel emotionally attached to a product are twice as likely to recommend it and stick with it.
Conclusion
Delight is what happens when you understand people well enough to take the rough edges out of their experience, spot what they’ll need before they say it, and add just a little more than they thought was possible. When you get it right, you earn trust, loyalty, and sometimes even love. That’s the sort of bond no competitor can easily copy!
At dualoop, we’ve seen that delight only sticks when it’s anchored in solid discovery and delivery. If you skip discovery, delight turns into gimmicks, and if you skip delight, discovery risks producing forgettable products. The magic sits in the middle: when strong product practices meet emotional connection. That’s when teams stop shipping features and start building products people truly care about.
