Validate Solutions with The Delight Excellence Checklist
A tool for Delight Excellence
When building for delight, we’re tapping into users’ emotions. This comes with some risks.
The other day, a close friend shared a personal story that quietly stuck with me.
In 2020, she lost her grandmother, someone who had been a steady, loving presence throughout her life. One afternoon, she went searching for a specific photo of her grandmother sitting in a sunlit kitchen, holding her then six-month-old baby and laughing at something on a phone screen. It was one of those quiet, fleeting moments that later took on more meaning.
She remembered the photo being shared on WhatsApp, so she scrolled through an old thread to find it. But when she got there, all she saw was a blurry thumbnail and a message:
“This photo is no longer available. Please contact Maria.”
She told me, “It caught me off guard. That one sentence felt so cold, like it didn’t understand what that photo meant to me. It wasn’t just a file; it was a memory.”
She wasn’t angry at the app. What hit her was the realization that even a simple message from a product could have softened the feeling of loss if it had been written with more care. “What if it had acknowledged what it means to lose something special?” she wondered.
Her story was a gentle but powerful reminder that our products intersect with deeply human moments. A single notification, however functional, can either soften an emotional experience or unintentionally make it heavier.
And the truth is, even if we care, it’s easy to forget this when we’ve got our heads down, working on roadmaps, metrics, and delivery cycles.
That’s why I created the delight excellence checklist, a set of guiding questions to help you assess the delightfulness of the features you are building. It’s how I make sure we’re not just building for performance, but also for people.
The Nine Questions of Delight Excellence
The delight excellence checklist is a set of nine essential questions designed to evaluate and validate the success of delightful solutions. It provides a structured way to ensure that your product not only delights, but also delivers impact.
Crafting innovative features and emotional connections is essential, but it’s equally important to assess their value. How do we ensure that our solutions truly resonate with users and drive business success?
User Impact
Every delightful feature must align with users’ goals and contribute to a meaningful impact to avoid feeling like an unnecessary addition. The question to ask is this:
Does the solution effectively help users achieve their goals?
Learning a new language is a long-term goal, often requiring motivation to stay consistent. Duolingo’s streak feature helps users achieve this by celebrating their daily practice milestones with playful animations and encouraging messages. This functional tool (tracking progress) becomes delightful through its celebratory design, making users feel rewarded for their efforts.
Business Impact
The biggest mistake when building delightful features is disconnecting them from business goals. Delight isn’t an excuse to create features that don’t serve a purpose; it should enhance the user experience and business success.
A key question to ask is this:
Does the solution effectively help achieve business goals?
Amazon’s return system is a great example. As a frequent Amazon user, I sometimes need to return products. Occasionally, Amazon allows me to keep the item while still receiving a refund. This unexpected gesture exceeds expectations and reduces the operational costs of processing returns.
Amazon’s return system delights users because it eliminates frustration, makes customers feel trusted, and builds goodwill.
Familiarity
Yes, we need to surprise our users, but not too much. Delightful solutions often find the sweet spot between novelty and familiarity. They introduce something new and exciting, while maintaining a sense of comfort and approachability.
The best question here to ask is this:
Does the solution balance being familiar and being innovative well enough to capture interest?
Innovation shouldn’t overwhelm users; it should feel approachable and intuitive. That’s the guiding philosophy behind Google’s Material Design principles: introducing innovation while maintaining consistency across apps, so experiences remain familiar, seamless, and easy to use.
Feasibility
As I’ve discussed, features that offer deep delight combine functionality and emotions. Since functionality is a key component, you must ensure that the feature is feasible and that it can be built and delivered successfully.
The key question to ask is this:
Can the solution be developed within a reasonable time frame and with the available skills and technology?
Multiple delightful ideas ended up being abandoned due to feasibility reasons. As a product leader and coach, I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly with brilliant ideas that were simply too complex to execute. Often, a simpler, more focused version of an idea could have been far more impactful. Feasibility isn’t just about what’s possible, it’s about balancing ambition with execution to ensure that innovation delivers real value.
Inclusiveness
The biggest risk related to delight is its subjectivity, what brings joy and excitement to one person might feel uncomfortable, frustrating, or even upsetting to another. Emotions are deeply personal and context-dependent, meaning that a delightful feature can land differently based on an individual’s mood, environment, or personal experiences. Even something that delights a user in one moment may not have the same effect in another.
This is why it’s crucial to ask the following:
Could the product potentially be harmful in some cases?
A feature designed to surprise, entertain, or emotionally engage should always be tested through multiple perspectives to avoid unintended negative consequences.
Take Apple’s iOS 17 and macOS’s Sonoma update, which introduced gesture reactions during video calls. If a user made a certain gesture, it triggered animations such as hearts, balloons, or fireworks behind them. While designed to add fun and spontaneity, this feature led to unexpected issues. For example, users in serious conversations, such as in therapy sessions, accidentally triggered fireworks which created awkward and inappropriate moments. What was meant to be delightful became an unwelcome distraction.
Distraction
Delightful features should support the user’s goals and enhance the primary experience, not create friction or frustration. Misplaced or overbearing features, even if well-intentioned, can detract from usability rather than add value.
A delightful feature should never stand between the user and their task, instead, it should act as a seamless helper, subtly improving the experience without causing distraction.
The key question to ask is this:
Does the solution enhance the primary experience without distraction?
A well-known example of delight gone wrong is Microsoft’s Clippy (or maybe only for my generation). Designed to assist users with tasks such as writing letters, Clippy aimed to be helpful and engaging. However, instead of enhancing the experience, it often became a source of frustration, interrupting workflows with un advice andsolicited animations.
To ensure a feature truly enhances the experience, test whether it seamlessly integrates into the user journey. Does it provide value without unnecessary interruptions? Aim for delight that complements the core experience, instead of competing with it.
Continuity
Delight is a combination of joy and surprise. But surprise is a tricky element. What amazes us today can quickly become expected tomorrow: the habituation effect. What once felt novel, eventually becomes the norm.
The challenge then isn’t just to create delightful features, but to ensure they evolve continuously to maintain their impact.
The key question to ask is this:
Is there a plan to maintain this delightful solution continuously?
Delight isn’t a one-time effort; it requires ongoing maintenance, updates, and enhancements to stay relevant and impactful. A feature that remains static risks losing its appeal, blending into the background of the user experience.
Measurability
Delight is measurable. To effectively validate delight, you need to define metrics that assess functional success and emotional impact. These metrics ensure that your feature delivers real value to users. while aligning with business goals. While emotions may seem intangible, multiple attempts have been made to quantify user happiness and delight.
Before launching a feature, ask yourself this question:
Are there metrics to track the desired delight?
Here are key measurement areas:
Engagement: Track how many users interact with the feature, how frequently they use it, and whether they skip or abandon it. High engagement signals that the feature resonates, while drop-off rates indicate friction or lack of interest.
Retention: Measure how often users return to the feature over time and whether it contributes to higher overall product usage. A delightful feature should create long-term reuse.
User Satisfaction: Use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to gauge how the feature is perceived and whether it meets user expectations.
Emotional Impact: Conduct post-usage surveys and leverage sentiment analysis on user feedback to understand the depth of emotional engagement the feature creates.
Business Impact: Evaluate whether the feature drives key business outcomes, such as increased revenue, higher subscription rates, or improved customer retention.
How to Use These Questions
Now that I’ve introduced the nine questions you can use to validate delight, here are some tips to use the questions most effectively.
I use these questions when I’m building either a new product, or features for an existing product, that directly impact users. I then go through the delight excellence checklist for each feature. I find it valuable to walk through the delight excellence checklist from multiple perspectives to ensure a well-rounded evaluation.
I typically involve the product trio of the product manager, designer, and tech lead when validating a feature against the list. If you have a UX researcher in addition to your product designer, it’s beneficial to also include them to bring deeper user insights.
Additionally, consider including other stakeholders, depending on the nature of the feature. For instance, a data scientist can help assess measurability, ensuring that the right metrics are in place. A marketing team can contribute to the discussion on how to introduce the feature in a way that surprises and excites users. By gathering diverse perspectives, you increase the chances of creating a delightful, well-executed, and impactful experience.
By using the nine questions from the delight excellence list, you can confidently validate whether your solutions achieve the desired delight objective.
he most successful products commonly use these delighters because they help elevate their product beyond functionality, creating moments users remember.
All you need to know to apply the Delight Excellence Checklist is in Product Delight book. You can sign up Now.