Overview

In this industry, we talk a lot about user needs, wants, and goals, but I’d like today to introduce you to a new metric, and way of thinking about your users.

Today, we’re going over how to understand your users’ expectations, and how to leverage that knowledge to build delight into your designs.

Understanding Expectations

Fundamentally, an expectation is how a person thinks something is going to go. A projection into the future, or an informed estimation of outcomes.

Expectations arise from the user’s journey

When a user is doing anything, they are doing it to achieve a particular set of outcomes, and garner results, either for their immediate needs, or their future needs.

As the user works through their journey, they move closer to where they want to be and begin to form expectations based on their needs.

Expectations are unfulfilled needs combined with product promises.

When you are designing to solve a problem, and then promise a user that your solution will solve their problem, the user’s expectations shift to match that promise.

We can break this down even further to get a better understanding of it.

The Three Values & Needs

I have referred to these before as the three legs of value, and essentially the represent what every user is ultimately after when using a product or service.

Every user has three distinct types of needs:

1. Emotional needs → How they feel
2. Utility needs → What they can do
3. Convenience needs → How easy it is for them to do

We see then that expectations arise from these needs when combined with a product’s promise, but ultimately are derived from the needs themselves in response to them.

The user makes an approximate guess based on which actions they believe will product the highest level of satisfaction in any or all of these needs, and proceeds according to which need type is the most valuable to them.

In the end, it’s all about feeling

Tomes could be written (and I’m sure have been) on the importance of appealing to a user’s emotional needs, and for good reason.

Right, wrong, weak, or strong emotions are what drive us. In fact it has been essentially proven that we operate and make decisions emotionally, and then use logic recursively in an attempt to justify our decisions.

Fascinating, no doubt, but how do we translate this to expectations?

The key here is understanding that we need to deliver all three values is a way that leaves the user feeling great about what they just did.

Understanding these expectations

With all that in mind, how can we best understand what a user is expecting?

Generally speaking we need to establish a baseline for how they already solve their problems, and their emotional satisfaction with their current approach.

They may have a way that satisfies their needs both in terms of utility and convenience, but it may not satisfy their emotional needs, and this is where we need to pay the most attention.

• How do your users feel after they do something to solve their problems?
• What are they saying? What are their mannerisms?
• How do they carry themselves?
• How much money did they spend, and would they say it was worth it?
• Does their current solution feel like a necessary evil?
• What do they (not would they) reasonably expect a better solution to provide them?
• How can you and your team help make this happen?

What is delight?

Now that we have a much better understanding of these expectations, we can move onto the notion of delight.

In essence, delight is unexpected value and it occurs when a users’ expectations are surpassed.

Let’s look at it like this:

• When we exceed expectations, we produce delight
• When we meet expectations, we produce satisfaction
• When we fall short of expectations, we produce disappointment

So this becomes the crux of our operations when designing for outcomes, and it becomes abundantly clear that traditional (utility) outcomes alone are not enough.

In order to create this delight that users crave, we need to continuously meet and exceed expectations in terms of total user baseline, with respect to their emotion, utility, and convenience needs.

Bringing it all together

In summary, we can reasonably assert that a users expectations are a combination of their needs and your product’s promise(s).

These expectations will almost always fall into the categories of:

1. Emotional needs → How they feel
2. Utility needs → What they can do
3. Convenience needs → How easy it is for the to do

and we can understand the baselines of where a user is currently at in terms of expectations by how they currently solve their problem(s).

From there, we can safely assume that emotional value must come first because most people make decisions emotionally and then use logic to justify it later. People want to feel good about it first and foremost, so we need to design for that.

How? By making sure that we are producing delight by consistently exceeding our users expectations when compared to their baselines.

Understand expectations, establish baselines, exceed baseline expectations, create delight, and your users will keep coming back for more.