I love doing homework! (said no student ever)
User Experience practitioners are in the business of creating positive experiences for our users, no matter what they are trying to accomplish. Some might even say we are in the business of creating delightful experiences — or at the very least, key moments of delight where we truly surpass expectations. But what if your product supports something that is universally NOT considered delightful? Things like doing your taxes, making a dentist appointment, or in the case of my team at Macmillan Learning, doing your homework.
What’s worse, students using our products (and classroom tech in general) don’t get to choose our system among a raft of others competing for their dollars, their instructor or institution does. So I hope I’m painting a clear picture here — students have no choice but to pay for a system someone else chose for them to do something decidedly undelightful. It may seem like a dismal starting place to strive for delight, but where’s the fun in design if there isn’t a challenge?
First off, let’s unpack the term delight. Much has been written (and maligned) about it in the UX community, but, honestly, what hasn’t gotten that treatment as trends fall in and out of favor? It’s still a popular part of our lexicon, and some of us have even built it into our ‘elevator pitch’ to explain to our jobs to others. Most of us have probably seen or heard a variant of this a number of times: “I design products so that they are usable, useful, and delightful.” With synonyms like please greatly, charm, enchant, captivate, entrance, bewitch, thrill, excite, and take someone’s breath away, it’s no wonder UX designers chase this kind of reaction in our users.
But what about the role of delight in education? If an activity is ‘captivating’ or ‘pleasing’, are students more likely to learn? Our UX team at Macmillan Learning is privileged to work closely with learning researchers throughout our process to make sure that our products are designed to maximize learning. So while we know that things like developing motivation and enabling metacognition drive better learning outcomes, it turns out that delight in and of itself isn’t something that leads to better learning. There is evidence however that the absence of delight, in particular when boredom takes over, can negatively impact learning. In a study looking at different cognitive-affective states and their impact on how students interacted with different learning systems, the authors looked specifically at the behavior of gaming the system (e.g. cheating, bending the rules, etc.), which has been shown to be associated with reduced learning. Boredom was found to be the most likely to be followed by gaming behaviors, and even beat out frustration for that dubious honor. The other states studied included confusion, engaged concentration, delight, and surprise, none of which were associated with gaming the system. It is also interesting to look at how the researchers coded delight: behaviors such as clapping hands, laughing with pleasure, and statements such as, “Yes!” or “I got it!”
So we know that moments of delight aren’t likely to impair learning, and at the very least can keep boredom away. That may seem rather ‘meh’ in terms of a reason to design for delight in our products. But we also know that even a system designed with the best learning science principles in mind can’t drive learning if students aren’t using it. So on top of embedding the key learning principles into our work, we still must design for usefulness, usability, and, yes, delight. When I asked my team to think of cases where students have expressed delight when using our products, they came up with some great examples. Sometimes delight comes from microinteractions where we try to sprinkle in a bit of fun, such as use of the “confetti” function on the iPhone when they receive 100% on a practice quiz.
Other times, it’s the scaffolding we can provide that students report as delightful — like when they figure out they’re able to read about the problem they’re being asked about in the text with a click of a button or when they get feedback on why their answers were wrong so that they gain understanding. And if laughing out loud is considered delight, we’re even happy with this student’s reaction:
To truly drive learning, our design team is focused on principles proven out by learning research. We will still strive to design for those moments of delight — sometimes that may be just the thing that gets us in the door and keeps a student sticking around so that the products we build can make a difference in their education and in their life. Now that is what delights us.
