Can “Wow” Be a Design Goal?

James M. Hudson PayPal | [e-mail]

Kameshwari (Kay) Viswanadha PayPal | [e-mail]

[ 1] Although we internally refer to these as “student accounts,” it’s likely that the name will change when we release the product.

Most product and design professionals have been directed to “wow our customers” at some point in their careers. But what does it really mean to wow customers? The business world throws around this word so often that it’s become a cliché, meaning little more than “let’s copy that other great company over there” or “let’s show off our cool technology.” It’s little surprise that many designers find themselves rolling their eyes when it comes to “wow.” But it shouldn’t be that way. It really is a good thing for customers to literally blurt out “wow!” as a positive reaction when they’re emotionally engaged. To rediscover what’s good about “wow,” however, we need to move beyond the cliché.

There are multiple ways in which design can wow customers. By pulling apart the generic wow and talking about multiple, precise wows, we can highlight clusters of design principles that seem to evoke different types of user engagement. Although these principles and techniques are well established, examining them in the context of multiple types of wow helps us to describe project goals more clearly and to begin building a library of design ideas useful for accomplishing those goals.

Our Motivation—
A Story

Over several months, we worked (with Kay as UI designer and James as user experience researcher ) along with a team of talented design professionals on a large project. As our designs evolved, we noticed something unusual happening. As the UI designer put it, the participants in our usability tests “just seemed to be having more fun” with the earlier designs. This was puzzling because our final designs seemed more desirable as a product to our participants.

When we reviewed the video-tapes from multiple rounds of usability testing, we observed that participants literally said “wow” about both earlier and later designs, but this reaction came at different times and in different ways. Looking at it closely, it became clear to us that there were multiple types of wow occurring. In the early designs, our participants had wow experiences. In our final designs, however, we had a wow product. But what do these distinctions really mean? And what was it about the design that led to one type of wow over another? Before we answer these questions, however, it’s useful to start with a key commonality.

Minimum Requirements for Designing Wow Usability experts have listed ease of use as a minimum requirement when discussing emotional design or user engagement, so it comes as no surprise that every wow reaction we observed occurred with highly usable design elements. To give an example, PayPal has a project currently in an internal beta phase that will allow teenagers to learn money-man-agement skills through a student account linked to their parent’s PayPal account [ 1]. For this project, designers consciously applied minimalism as a design principle and removed anything that was not strictly necessary in the interface of the child account. The financial language of credits and debits, for example, has been replaced with more straightforward terms like “money in” and “money out.” During testing, parents found it so easy for their children to use that they frequently asked for their own PayPal accounts to have this same interface. Although using simple language did not produce a wow reaction, it helped create an easy-to-use experience that formed the basis for a wow reaction.

Designing Wow Products