Design Delight - Series Intro

Fun and fluid or bland and frustrating?

There’s a reason why some brands serve up delightful digital experiences to consumers, while others fail to capture attention, often evoking frustration instead. This series dives into the fundamental principles of visual design which you need to create delightful digital experiences for consumers.

Now, just because you apply these principles to your website or app does not guarantee a delightful experience for consumers. That also requires good content. Rather, the principles in this series will help you arrange and taylor your content in a way that helps it attract maximum attention, while making it easier for the brain to process.

So to make this very clear:

We won’t be exploring what kind of content you need in order to create “delightful” experiences. That differs between brand and industry. Content that captivates an adventurous bike enthusiast may not captivate a middle-aged woman seeking to lose weight.

Fortunately, the principles we’ll be exploring can and should in fact be used by any brand in any industry. This is because these principles are based on how ALL human beings interpret visual data. They are based on how our brains process what our eyes see. Apart from an extremely small minority that suffers from genetic mutations or accidents, all 7 billion people process visual data in the same way. This is exactly why we can (and in fact need to) apply these principles in order to design delightful visual experiences:

because using them helps us arrange and taylor our content in a way that we know the human brain will process effortlessly and pleasantly.  Conversely, not applying these principles creates a visual experience where the brain encounters friction when processing the content. We must avoid such experiences at all costs. They cause frustration and that’s not how we want consumers to feel about our brand.

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