At the top of Aaron Walter’s pyramid of the user’s needs sits delight.

So what is delight in software? I like to think of delight as an unnecessary positive addition to the experience. This can be anything from a hover effect to a video or even clever text. Elements of delight do not contribute to the functionality, reliability or usability of the product; they are purely for fun. Let me show you a couple examples.

A common form of delight is what most people call Easter Eggs. These are fun, surprising features of a product. A popular example is Google’s Do a Barrel Roll. If you type ‘do a barrel roll’ into Google, the window ‘does a barrel roll’ and your screen flips around in a circle.

Delight does not always have to be as wild as doing barrel rolls. They can be as simple as a picture or drawing. Google’s 404 page is a good example. Reaching a 404 page is never fun, but Google makes it a little less painful with a cute, broken robot.

My favorite example of delight is Hipmunk’s flying chipmunk. While this site is searching for your flights, the cutest chipmunk on the internet bobs back and forth like he is flying. It’s adorable.

So why do I think these elements of delight are necessary? Because they give the user something to remember. They bring emotion to a process that is so automated. Searching for flights is terrible! I usually leave the experience feeling like I just wasted an hour staring at a screen full of high prices instead of feeling excited for my upcoming trip. Hipmunk is fantastic because it is very easy to use, reliable and functional, but without that chipmunk I probably would not use Hipmunk as much as I do. It is not often I smile when I am searching for flights, but I smile every time I see that little guy.

Elements of delight can give a company a personality. They show the user that there are not only computers behind the product, but people. People design and build everything you use, but too often a product might as well have been designed by a robot. Displaying delight in a product brings out the human in our world of monotonous data gorging.