If you, or someone you know, has been around Anthroware for more than three minutes, you have likely been exposed to the idea of “delightful experiences”.
When you hear “delightful experience”, maybe your mental schema brings up a memory of being a kid at Disney World. Maybe it’s the memory of the first time you reeled in a fish. Maybe it was just a pleasant day when the weather was nice and everything just fell in place and went your way.
Delight is hard to deliver. Delight is fragile. Delight is precious. It takes intense effort and time to build, but can be shattered in seconds. Just like trust.
Anthroware is in the business of delivering delight. In this blog, we are going to show you how using the Kano Model.
Before we talk about Professor Noriaki Kano, let’s talk about the phenomenon of user experiences and customer service as it relates to generational expectations. The best experiences of one generation become the standard for the next. Not big generations like Boomers and Millennials, but more like the generational wave of a Product Life Cycle.
Travel accommodation experiences have changed with AirBnB disrupting the industry by delivering delight. A prime example is where hotels put outlets in rooms - because you need a place to charge your phone at night without moving a nightstand or unplugging a lamp. Homes do this naturally, because you’ll want to plug your phone in at a very similar location to where I plug my phone in. We have similar needs. Hotels weren’t originally designed that way. Accessible outlets are being retroactively installed in hotels rooms because the market disrupter elevated the standard of experience (AKA AirBnB delivered delight), challenging the incumbents.
Maybe that example is compounded by everyone traveling with at least 2 digital devices.. so here's another example: restaurants. Restaurants are special by nature, offering a huge range of customer service and expectations. Regardless of going to your neighborhood Italian joint (shout out to Vinnie’s in Asheville) or your local Applebee’s chain, the menu will be online. If a restaurant’s menu is not online, they are delivering below-basic needs. The heightened experiences of the past continually become the future standard.
One more example, then I think the point will be driven home…internet speed. Who’s going back to a 56k modem any time soon?
Professor Kano made a model to express this. “The Kano model is a theory of product development and customer satisfaction developed in the 1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano, which classifies customer preferences into five categories.” (Thanks, Wikipedia).
Over time, attributes drift from performance/high-end/luxury to essential/basic; like Back-Up Cameras in cars. These were once luxury features and are now standard on every model of every new car. You see the same pattern with side/curtain airbags. It was once a high-end safety feature, and now standard.
If you are like us (building websites, apps, software), to deliver delight you must build an experience with an appropriate yet surprising feature set. Surprise the user by predicting their needs and wants. Now here’s the big secret – you don’t need to guess or employ consultants to discover the needs and wants of users to find that magical delight delivering combination. All you need to do is test with real users, survey potential users, observe real users interacting with your products, and ask “why?” repeatedly. Understanding their motivation will reveal desired, and potentially unarticulated, experiences.
Give your users only what they want and let them guide you on how they want to get it. Delight doesn’t drop from the sky. It takes work, effort, and empathy. Just like trust.
