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Hello readers! 👋

Imagine that you’re travelling on a bus, on your way to your next destination. You're bored, or perhaps a bit tired. All of the sudden, your favorite song begins playing from the radio, and the bus driver begins singing passionately along!

How would you feel? Happy? Annoyed? Confused?

Regardless of your exact emotional state, one thing is certain: it's surprising and memorable.

Today, we are exploring surprise, and its use as a design tool in some of our most delightful products. Surprise is a powerful emotion- one that has been shown to increase recognition, focus, attention, and recall. When used smartly in products, surprising design elements bring joy and delight. But when used poorly, usability suffers and frustration increases. How do we as product builders and designers find the right balance?

In this issue, we’ll cover these questions, and:

• The history of surprise & its use in technology design

• The science behind the power of surprise

• How great products use surprise to create delight

Let's get started!

To navigate, click the linked sections below or simply scroll 📜

How Surprise Works

A brief history of surprise, and the science behind it.

Surprise in Products

How to use surprise for product design and delight.

Learning Resources

3 brainy resources to learn more about surprise.

Animations courtesy of Emma Wang, Artur Romanov, and Sumesh Sugathan.

Let's begin with a brief history of technology design.

In the 1980s, falling prices of personal computers (PCs) led to a shift in tech design from functionality to usability. Before this point, computers were typically very expensive, centralized pieces of complex equipment, used by highly educated specialists. However, with the rise of PCs in the workplace, it became more likely that PC users would not always have the same in-depth knowledge of software and operating systems. In order to make PCs easier to use, terms like "user friendliness" were coined, and companies, such as Apple Computer, Inc., began to focus heavily on usability. More on this history here.

However, as Don Norman noted, in his well-known book, "The Design of Everyday Things", "usable designs are not necessarily pleasurable ones." As technology evolved through the 1990s and into the 2000s, the definition of usability expanded to include visual aesthetics and emotional factors.

Today, most well-designed digital products include all of these aspects: functional design, usability, visual, and emotional. We think of products as not only opportunities for efficiency, but also for play and delight.

According to research, one of the most powerful tools we can use to make products feel more exciting and memorable is— you guessed it— surprise.

The Science of Surprise

To better understand surprise, let's start with the basics.

What is surprise? ⚡

According to Paul Ekman (American psychologist known for his groundbreaking studies in emotion), "Surprise arises when we encounter sudden and unexpected sounds or movements. As the briefest of the universal emotions, its function is to focus our attention on determining what is happening and whether or not it is dangerous."

A fairly multi-faceted emotion, surprise can come in different variants, including:

• Emotional dimension: Neutral/moderate, pleasant, unpleasant, positive, or negative (source)

• Level of intensity: From little-surprise to very-surprised. Depending on the degree of surprise, this can lead to a mild reaction; at the highest, it can trigger fight-or-flight response.

This is your brain... on surprise 🤯

When surprise happens, our body immediately reacts. In our brain, our bilateral hippocampus— a peanut shell-sized segment of our brain, associated with memory— is activated, as our brain tries to quickly assess the stimuli, against previous experiences. At the same time, our amygdala— the emotional processing center of our brain— goes to work, trying to determine if the stimulus is positive or negative, so that we can form a behavioral response. Depending on the desired behavioral response, the amygdala then releases a specific set of neurons, which can trigger a variety of responses from arousal and pleasure to fear.

Tania Luna, a researcher and writer at Psychology Today, says this about surprise:

Applications in the "real-world" 🤔

Unsurprisingly (excuse the wordplay), the use of surprise has been tremendously helpful in learning. In the journal, Educational Theory, Jonathan E. Adler, a former Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, noted that surprising pieces of information tended to draw more attention from students, leading to more intensive processing of the material, and better retention.

Other research studies have further underlined the power of surprise to improve memory, improve likability, increase word-of-mouth, and even make products more interesting!

Now that we know all of the benefits that surprise can create, how might we apply this to our own products? Two areas you can start with are: user onboarding and milestone interactions.

User Onboarding 🏄

When people are shown something unexpected, they are surprised, and thus more likely to remember it in the future. Many of us product people call this the "aha!" moment. It's the process of nudging users into discovery and exploration as they begin to use your product (Note: You can learn more about onboarding in our past issue).

Lookout, for example, is a mobile security app that helps you protect your devices. Rather than inundating users with tons of video tutorials and walkthroughs, Lookout opts for a simple, silly 4-question quiz.

Using surprise as a tool for onboarding is particularly common in video game tutorials. Many games will start by "trapping" users in surprise scenario— typically, a tutorial level where the player then has to learn all of their skills in order to proceed.

Moving Out is a fun multiplayer that casts players as reckless movers in an incompetent moving company. Its game tutorial is full of surprising, irreverent humor that makes onboarding both easier to remember and enjoy.

You can watch a few minutes of the tutorial below to experience it yourself.

⤷ Above: A game tutorial for multiplayer game, Moving Out. Humor and activity sequence are used to create a fun, surprising tutorial experience. (Courtesy of XCageGame)

Milestone Interactions 🌟

As product designers, we often want to encourage users to take specific actions. At the end of a particular milestone, we can employ surprise through animations, interactions, and celebrations to elevate the moment from "meh" to "wow!".

If you are a Spotify user, you may remember last year's viral "Wrapped 2020", an immersive experience that surprised listeners by summarizing their top artists, top songs, minutes listened, and top genres for the past year. What made Wrapped 2020 particularly delightful was their smart use of copy, video, and visuals to first tease a category, and then surprise listeners with the results.

Apparently Wrapped 2020 was so addictive, that it was directly responsible for a 21% increase in Spotify mobile downloads within 7 days of being released!

Lemonade, an insurance company, recently released "2021 Lemonade Giveback", an annual report summarizing their community giving and contributions. While most of these reports tend to be quite cut-and-dry, Lemonade opted for a surprising format that really elevated the reading experience.

Knowledge Check ✅

So what have we learned? Surprise can be used in products in two main areas: user onboarding & milestone interactions. To try applying surprise into your own products, ask yourself the following questions:

• Where are users likely to be learning and retaining information?

• How can we make the presentation of this content more interactive and engaging?

• How can we use elements of surprise— unexpected feedback, visuals, or two-way interactions— to make the product more memorable?

When applied correctly, this technique creates benefits for both designers and users. Not only are surprised users more innately curious about your product, but surprise can also nudge users into a more open-ended and exploratory mindset, allowing them to understand how to use your product more easily and intuitively. It's a win-win!

Now that you understand the power of surprise, here are some resources to further your learning.

• For instructors & online educators: “The Psychology of Surprise in E-Learning” is a short article, with actionable steps on how to drive engagement in online education.

• For habit-builders: "Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected", by Tania Luna, is a book on how to harness the power of surprise at work, in your relationships, and your everyday lives. Good for fans of James Clear, Malcolm Gladwell and Charles Duhigg.

• For inspiration-seekers: This YouTube video is full of beautiful, surprising, and memorable web designs. Warning: some examples are so gorgeous that you may feel sad afterwards, going back to "regular" websites.

Wrapping Up 🎁

As we've learned today, surprise was originally an evolutionary trait that helped humans survive. When encountering something unexpected, our brain gives it increased attention and focus, resulting in improved recognition and recall.

For users, surprise elevates the moment of interaction from mundane to memorable. Surprise in products are especially powerful because they require the user to extend their understanding of the world. That moment of initial shock causes people's brains to work to fit this new information into their previous expectations, resulting in a spike in mental energy and an escape from boredom.

And that, as we know, makes your product delightful.

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About the Writer

Lucy is a product leader, design nerd, and occasional blanket burrito. When not putting together newsletters, you can find her nose deep in a book or exploring no-code tools.

If you’re curious about digital products, lifelong learning, or want to share something surprising, let’s connect on Twitter!