Back in the mid to late Noughties, ‘Surprise and Delight’ was the marketing term du jour. Everyone wanted to go above and beyond in their output - making audiences coo with awe and fall even deeper in love with their brands.
It quickly became a huge cliché although you can still find it referenced on modern product marketing blogs. The phrase has stuck with me though. There’s something about surprising people that I find, if you’ll pardon me, well, just delightful. There’s something about bringing people into a club that is joyful, that promotes a sense of belonging, that justifies everyone’s presence in the world.
I tend to collect little snippets of thoughts. In this week’s newsletter I have dumped some of the thoughts I have on this particular subject. In no particular order, with no particular continuity. Something in there might prove useful to you. Let me know.
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A Loose Collection of Thoughts
📘 What follows are a bunch of loosely connected thoughts from my (Alex’s) notebook. They’re things I’ve been mulling over for a while that just needed an outlet and, well, this is it.
😆 I once worked with someone whose gauge of how well a pitch was going in the boardroom next to his office was how many laughs he could hear through the wall. In many senses he was an absolute nightmare to work with but his predictions on whether we would win the work were right far more than they were wrong.
🦪 When I first started out in my career as a game developer I worked closely with one of the greatest designers you could imagine. A creative genius whose phone doodles I would steal to marvel at when he wasn’t looking. He had full creative control of all the narrative and much of the design we were working on. The game world was our oyster. He taught me that when you have the freedom to do anything you should make people laugh.
🧙🏻♂️ A great friend of mine and his partner are a part-time magician and a full-time clown. They once did a street show at the Fringe that we went to see. About two thirds of the way through their brilliant act and half way through another trick my friend made one of his fingers disappear. It was a two second trick you could only see from the section of the audience I was standing in and only if you were looking in the right place at the right time. A secret trick. Just for me.
🍫 It’s a long time since I’ve had a solid chocolate KitKat and I read recently that the manufacturing process had changed so that they no longer occur at all. In the past I’d heard that while they initially were a manufacturing error, Rowntree continued to make them on purpose because the joy of receiving one was just incredible marketing. I imagine that particularly joyful error was been ironed out when they were taken over by Nestlé.
🎰 Slot machines often have cheat modes that are activated by long chains of pressing the right buttons in the right order. They’re closely guarded secrets but people stumble across them by accident. The excitement of being in the know and potentially tripping the cheat mode again keeps people coming back for more.
♣️ Derren Brown wrote that he has a lighter with the 9 of clubs carved into it. When he used to do card magic he would sometimes pull the lighter out in the middle of a trick and ask the mark if that was their card. Most of the time they’d say no and he’d just carry on with the original trick but one time in fifty two they’d be so blown away that they would never forget it.
🧃 Way back in 2005 Kyle Gabler and Kyle Gray wrote a now removed article on an old game developer website about making a game in 7 days. They talked about “juicing” your game up. A few years letter Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho did a talk on how to juice up your game. This talk permanently changed game development for the better. It’s all about adding more snazz, more bounce, more squish, more pizzazz to everything to make it feel more reactive and interesting. So much of what they talk about could be applied to your ERP system or or your warehouse management system or Microsoft Excel. Why are our enterprise tools always so boring?
🧠 Some of the best episodes of the podcast Andrew and I record outside of work are the ones where we extend an every day idea, like Google Maps, and introduce a huge surprising twist, like Google Treasure Maps. So much of our life has been optimised, honed and sharpened that all sense of whimsy has gone. There is no room for surprise or delight because we’re too busy grinding. Bring on the Service Designers that design for joyful interaction.
🚪 There you go. I opened a weird little door into my brain and you got to have a look inside. I don’t know whether any of this is useful but hopefully it either surprised or delighted you! At the very least it’s all out of my brain now so I won’t have to think about it for a while.