The Three Pillars of Delight
Create delight by removing friction, anticipating needs, or exceeding expectations
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 95%
A practical lens for making any product moment delightful by acting on one of three levers. Grounded in the definition that delight = joy + surprise, each pillar produces that emotional combination in a different way. You don't need all three in one feature; pick the one that fits the moment.
Origin
Nesrine Changuel's practical translation of the academic definition of delight (joy + surprise, from Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions) into product-buildable levers, from her book 'Product Delight.' She cites Rahul Vora (Superhuman CEO) for the 'set the bar higher than your users themselves' idea underpinning the second and third pillars.
Core principles
- 01Delight is the combination of two emotions: joy and surprise
- 02You do not have to apply all three pillars at once
- 03Each pillar must carry concrete value, not just an aesthetic flourish
- 04Set the bar higher than users would set for themselves
How to run it
- 1
Remove friction at valley moments
Identify 'valley moments' where the user's emotion bottoms out (anxiety, stress, anger) and use your product to collapse that friction. Make something the user expects to be hard become trivially easy.
Pro tip Hunt specifically for moments the user dreads: cancellations, refunds, unsubscribing. Turning a feared task into two clicks creates outsized delight.
- 2
Anticipate needs before users ask
Deliver something the user needs before they request it. If you wait for users to tell you what they want, you're merely honoring needs, not surprising them.
Pro tip Look at who your users actually are and infer latent needs from their context (e.g. Revolut users are international travelers, so an in-app eSIM tab anticipates roaming pain).
- 3
Exceed expectations
Once you've anticipated a need, give more than was asked for, creating surprise on top of the functional win.
Pro tip Bundle an unrequested bonus into an existing flow, e.g. Edge auto-applying a discount coupon at checkout the user never went looking for.
Watch out The surprise from exceeding expectations decays over time (habituation), so plan to keep renewing it.
In the wild
After a driver cancelled and Changuel was still wrongly charged for a waiting-time and trip she never took, she braced to write a long complaint essay. Instead the app offered a two-click refund: select the trip, money back.
→ A moment engineered to be low-emotion (anger, stress) was flipped to delight by removing friction, making her more willing to take future trips.
Changuel resisted switching to Revolut for years until, landing in Singapore facing extreme roaming fees, her husband bought an eSIM inside the banking app for 7 euros in seconds.
→ Anticipating that its international/expat user base travels, Revolut surprised her with a need met before she asked, winning her as a user.
Common mistakes
Treating confetti as delight
Shake-for-snowflakes gimmicks with no underlying value are not delight; the pillar must attach to a concrete reason and value.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product and design teams looking for a fast, memorable heuristic to make specific product moments delightful during design reviews.
Not ideal for
Teams that need portfolio-level prioritization across many features; use the full Delight Model and 50/40/10 rule for that.
From the transcript
“we need to satisfy three main pillars. The very first one is like removing friction. The second one is anticipating need and the third one…”
“So these two emotions are joy and surprise”
“identify what we call this valet moment”
“when I get to the app, there have been only two clicks to get refunded”
“he went to a tab called eim buy eim €7 it's done”
“in order for a product to be loved, you need to set the bar higher than your users themselves”
From the episode
A 4-step framework for building delightful products
Nesrine Changuel (Spotify, Google, Skype)