I had another one of those delightful moments while shopping for T-shirts at Threadless yesterday.

A lot has always been said about the triad: useful, usable, desirable. I actually prefer using delightful instead of desirable. In my opinion the math is like this: useful + usable + delightful = desirable. A product is desirable to people because of a perfect combination of those 3 aspects.

There’s a lot of research around affective computing and the like. Most of this research is focused on: how do we measure desirability? How do we measure emotion? As a designer, I am actually more interested in finding out which designs and interactions delight people.

Since I know what delights me, I decided to start posting example of these things. And maybe, from that, gain a better understanding of these delightful moments. A lot of this I know through my own common sense. But it doesn’t cost to observe even more.

I didn’t see anyone from Apple at the Design & Emotion Conference in Hong Kong. And still, all their products are super desirable and delightful. How do they do it? Well, we can see it, right? And, most importantly, we can experience it in their products, designs and interactions.

I’ll finish this post with a few definitions of delight.

Delight
From latin “delectare”, which means “to charm”
1. To please (someone) greatly
2. Take great pleasure in

Oh, darling, what a charming design that is!