I explored this in more detail in an article recently published in Thailand’s leading English-language newspaper, The Nation. Sharing the full piece below.

Crafting exceptional digital products and services that truly captivate and delight users is both an art and a science, combining thoughtful design, intuitive usability, and technological innovation.

In a world where users have endless options and short attention spans, the challenge for designers and developers is to go beyond functionality to create experiences that engage, resonate, and keep users coming back. I have dedicated my career to Human-Centred Design, helping businesses—from TechStars and YCombinator startups to Fortune 100 corporations—create impactful applications through User Research and Product Design. My experience includes working with organisations like the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Agoda, and Xendit. I have been honoured as one of the top 10 UX mentors in the APAC region by ADPList. I have been a speaker at Bangkok Design Week. Additionally, as the founder of UX Happy Hour Bangkok, which is Bangkok’s largest and longest-running UX meetup, I actively contribute to nurturing the local UX community. In this article I will discuss key elements to delight users of your digital products and services.

Defining Delight

To craft exceptional digital products that delight users, we must first define what “delight” really means. In our everyday lives, we experience many moments of delight: the joy of winning a game, achieving a perfect score on an exam, or getting a promotion at work. While these are all examples of delight, they represent different kinds of delight, each tied to its specific context.

Delight is not a one-size-fits-all concept. It means different things in different contexts, and as designers, it is crucial to understand those nuances to create user experiences that genuinely resonate.

Consider a few examples. If you renew your driver’s licence at a government office, the experience might involve long lines, complicated paperwork, and slow processing. When renewing my licence, the documentation required involved me having to go from one government office to another in a week’s long process. A delightful experience in this context would involve simple paperwork and fast, efficient service.

Grocery shopping can also be frustrating with unclear product labels and long checkout lines; my lactose-intolerant friend once realised that after a long wait at the check-out, they had inadvertently purchased regular milk by mistake. Clear labelling and faster service would have made a difference. Opening a bank account may involve long waits, confusing paperwork, and hidden fees, but a delightful experience would be straightforward and transparent. In any context, delight comes from making difficult tasks easy and enjoyable.

Building for Delight

Creating delight starts with understanding what delight means in the context of a specific product or service. User research plays a crucial role in uncovering pain points—those moments where users feel confused, frustrated, or anxious.

One thing that stood out in my work with different companies was how their discovery processes varied depending on their growth stage.

In early-stage startups like SimpleRelevance (TechStars Chicago 2013, acquired by Rise Interactive) and Xendit (YCombinator Spring 2015, Indonesia’s largest B2B unicorn), discovery focused on delighting high-value clients, or “whales.” User research centred on meeting their needs and solving their problems. However, customer support functions were often barebones, so there wasn’t much data to gather from those touchpoints.

As SimpleRelevance and Xendit entered their hyper-growth phase, the discovery focus expanded to include additional user segments. At this stage, customer support teams were more established, providing valuable data that could be leveraged to improve product features and resolve emerging issues.

Larger organisations like the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Agoda had a broader discovery process. They researched all user segments and focused on localisation to tailor experiences to regional markets. Their customer support teams also interacted with customers, so it was possible to leverage the data from that customer interaction to help identify issues for product development.

Though companies varied in their approach, they shared common practices. They all used a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods -—user interviews, contextual inquiries, and shadowing as well as surveys, analytics, and customer support logs. This combination helped them understand what frustrates users and informed the design of what might result in delightful experiences.

Designing for Delight

Once we understand user pain points, it’s time to design for delight. Dana Chisnell, a founding member of the United States Digital Service (USDS), describes three primary approaches to designing for delight: Pleasure, Flow, and Meaning.

Pleasure: Delight can be achieved by anticipating users’ needs and contexts. For instance, the weather app Swackett enhances the experience by using dynamic illustrations to suggest outfits based on the forecast, turning the mundane task of checking the weather into a fun, engaging activity.

Flow: Creating a seamless experience that matches users’ mental models also fosters delight. When users quickly grasp how a system operates and receive immediate feedback, they enter a flow state, making tasks feel effortless. Amazon’s 1-Click checkout exemplifies this with its simple interface and speedy process, reducing friction and enhancing user satisfaction.

Meaning: Finally, delight comes from connecting users to a larger purpose. Freitag, which makes bags from recycled truck tarps, gives customers a sense of contribution to sustainability. Their functional products carry meaning, allowing users to feel they’re positively impacting the environment.

While designing for delight, it’s important to remember that delight only works when users’ basic expectations are met. No amount of pleasurable, meaningful, or flow-driven experiences will satisfy users if a product’s core functionality fails to meet their needs.

In conclusion, delight is a powerful tool in product design but requires a deep understanding of the user’s context and needs. By focusing on user research, leveraging insights from the customers at every stage of a company’s growth, and employing approaches like Pleasure, Flow, and Meaning, we can create digital experiences that meet user expectations and exceed them, leaving them with an experience that is truly delightful.

TL;DR – It’s a whole lot of hype and little substance.

The longer version –

At its core, UX is about de-risking your product or service by understanding your user and how they use your product or service, and designing your solution accordingly, so it solves their pain points or addresses opportunities for them in their natural context of use alongside the real-world constraints that they face.

Right now, the current generation of AI tools can create some pretty slick interfaces and cool prototypes with just a few prompts. But here’s the thing: they’re completely reliant on the data that they have been trained on, which might not even be relevant to your target customer segments. It’s a bit like when company leadership wants to design a product or service, saying that they know their customers and there’s no need to do user research, but as we’ve all seen, that is rarely, if ever, true, and there is a disconnect between what they know and customer pain points. So, products and services created without user research rarely result in great customer experiences and often require expensive rework.

AI tools in this generation (and for at least the near future, in my view) are quite far away from being able to actively observe and analyze user behavior, conduct deep dive interviews to understand pain points, and process that into meaningful insights that can then be used to build the right solutions for your target customers.

That said, AI-powered design tools are absolutely awesome for productivity gains in the design process. I would call them the new whiteboard tools. No longer do you need to spend a bunch of time on whiteboards, Figma, and prototyping tools to figure out if concepts are feasible to build out. With a few simple prompts, now we can rapidly prototype concepts alongside engineering and business teams to determine feasible concepts that we can then proceed to test out with customers.

Now some folks might say that “We could just launch and validate it in the market. We don’t need to do any research prior to launch”, and yes, you could do that, but that misses the entire point of de-risking the product. You risk significant brand and reputation damage if customers don’t like your product. You must capture feedback, fix issues, and relaunch. If there’s a major change, you’ll need to help customers navigate it, which consumes more resources. These add more cost (time, money, resources) and lost sales revenue during this time. So why inflict this pain on yourself and your company unnecessarily?

Engaging in research can help you mitigate that risk by actually identifying the needs, wants, and pain points of your customers that you can build products and services around.

UX Research further helps you figure out how to prioritize and launch them to maximize user retention while creating monetization opportunities.