💡Product Circle ⭕ Chat - the Delight Framework with Dr Nesrine Changuel
What happens when you design for joy—not just utility? At 💡 Product Circle ⭕ Chat 43, Dr. Nesrine Changuel reveals the strategy behind emotional connection, viral growth, and unforgettable moments.
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Let’s get back to Nesrine’s talk on the Delight Framework.
"A product that solves a problem is useful. A product that creates an emotional connection is unforgetable" - Nesrine Changuel
This 💡Product Circle⭕ Chat was run on the 23 April 2025 at 6pm (AEST) with Dr Nesrine Changuel
Recording below👇🏼
🎧 Beyond Function: How Nesrine Changuel Designs Products That Delight
When’s the last time a product truly delighted you?
Not just worked. Not just met your needs.
But actually sparked emotion, made you smile, or stuck in your mind long after?
That’s what Dr. Nesrine Changuel, former product leader at Spotify, Google, Microsoft, calls Product Delight. And in our latest Product Circle Chat, she walked us through exactly how to design for it.
“The best products don’t just solve problems—they create emotional connections.”
Here’s what we learned…
🧠 Why Delight Matters (More Than You Think)
To open the chat, Nesrine shared a story—about a dinner in Stockholm. Not the food, not the service… but the bill-splitting experience. A moment that’s usually awkward was made seamless, even enjoyable, through a small digital interaction.
The point?
“Delight often happens in the in-between. Not the core feature, but the moment that surprises and connects.”
She explained that in today’s crowded market, it’s not enough for products to be functional—they must also be emotional.
And there’s data to back that up:
🧍 Emotionally connected users are 50% more loyal
💰 They’re 2x more likely to purchase again
📣 And 60% more likely to actively refer others
That’s retention, revenue, and referral—product metrics with a heart.
💡 The Delight Grid Framework
So how do you actually build for delight?
Nesrine’s Delight Grid is a lightweight, adaptable framework that fits within existing product discovery and delivery practices. It operates in two spaces:
Opportunity Space – What motivates users?
Solution Space – How can we solve for both emotion and function?
🔄 The 4 Steps of the Delight Grid Framework
Step 1: Identify Motivators
Before designing anything, you must understand why your users use your product. What drives them?
Every user is driven by motivators—conscious or not.
These fall into three types of segmentation:
Demographic – Who they are
Behavioural – How they use your product
Motivational – Why they use your product
Understanding all three is crucial to designing a product that goes beyond utility.
The motivational layer is where delight lives. And within that, Nesrine highlighted:
Functional Motivators: Goal-oriented needs (e.g. booking, sending, listening)
Emotional Motivators: Deeper desires (e.g. feeling relaxed, valued, seen)
Social Motivators: How users want to be perceived by others (e.g. part of a movement, in the know)
For Spotify, the Motivators looked like this
As a Product Manager it’s important to spend time to understand these motivators. That means User Insights - ask your users, get closer to them with an empathy mindset. Ask emotional questions:
Nesrine shared delightful real-world stories—like a payment experience in Stockholm and a surprise kid’s activity box on a 12-hour flight—where designing for emotion completely changed the customer experience.
“Sometimes, the moment people talk about isn’t the product itself—but the feeling it gave them.”
Step 2: Convert Motivators into Product Opportunities
Once motivators are understood, the next step is to translate them into design opportunities.
🔹 Nesrine uses a modified Double Diamond Framework—but starts earlier, with motivators as the entry point.
🔹 She encourages teams to ask:
“How might we…?”
For example:
“How might we improve meeting experiences to reduce boredom and boost interaction?”
💡 Case Study: At Google Meet, Nesrine’s team introduced reactions (thumbs up, hearts, waves) to counter digital fatigue. These subtle design choices improved emotional engagement without disrupting the meeting flow.
Google meet opportunities during 2020:
Led to Google meet solution - reactions
Step 3: Brainwrite, Not Brainstorm
Rather than traditional brainstorming, Nesrine recommends brainwriting—a quieter, bias-free ideation process where everyone independently writes down ideas before discussing them.
🧠 Why it works:
Reduces influence from loud voices or leaders
Encourages diverse thinking
Surfaces deeper, less obvious ideas
Once you have ideas—how do you know which ones spark delight?
Step 4: Use the Delight Grid
Here’s where it all comes together.
🟩 The Delight Grid is a visual tool that helps teams map solutions based on the type of motivator they satisfy:
X-axis: Emotional Motivators
Y-axis: Functional Motivators
🧭 Once you plot a solution:
Low Delight: Solves only a functional motivator
Surface Delight: Solves only an emotional motivator. Make people smile.
Deep Delight: Solves both functional and emotional motivators. Create that Loyalty
💬 Nesrine's advice:
“Don’t aim for just one. The best roadmaps combine all three—low, surface, and deep delight.”
🎧 Spotify Wrapped: The Power of Social Delight
At Spotify, there were a number of products or features that Nesrine worked on:
Mapping these in the Delight Grid
Nesrine gave more insight into Spotify Wrapped, which she helped shape during her time at Spotify. It’s a pure emotional feature that makes people smile and talk about it.
In 2020, Wrapped drove a 20% increase in downloads
In 2022, it was shared over 100 million times
Wrapped isn’t a feature—it’s an emotional story users get to share about themselves. That’s the power of combining functional delivery with social delight.
Nesrine showed how several Spotify features she worked on map to different delight levels:
Low Delight: Normalising volume between tracks
Surface Delight: Star Wars lightsaber progress bar (fun but not critical)
Deep Delight: Spotify Wrapped and Spotify Jam—blending emotion, identity, and music discovery in one experience
Once you’ve mapped your product ideas onto the Delight Grid, Nesrine introduces a bonus concept—Delight Enhancers. These are design principles or moments that amplify emotional resonance. You can layer them onto product experiences to elevate delight from good to unforgettable. Watch the video to learn more 👇
TL;DR
Delight is not the cherry on top—it’s part of the recipe.
By understanding your users' functional needs and emotional motivations, and building experiences that honour both, you can create not just usable products—but loved ones.
And thanks to the Delight Grid, you now have a clear way to map, measure, and design for it.
Product Circle Chat 43 - Topic
Topic: Beyond Function: The Secret to Building Delightful Products
In this exclusive 💡Product Circle ⭕ Chat, Nesrine Changuel revealed (for the first time live to an Australian Audience) the Delight Grid, a powerful framework that helps product teams move beyond functionality and create experiences that captivate, engage, and inspire. We learned how to infuse joy, emotional resonance, and deep connection into our product design—turning users into advocates and products into unforgettable memories.
🔹 How the best tech companies create truly loved products
🔹 The Delight Grid—a step-by-step method for designing joy
🔹 How to go beyond the "nice-to-have" mindset and make delight a core product strategy
🔹 Real-world examples of how Google, Spotify, and Microsoft build unforgettable experiences
Product Circle Chat 43 - Video
Product Circle Chat 43 - Speaker
Dr. Nesrine Changuel is a Product Expert, ex-Google, Spotify, Microsoft, Lecturer, and Speaker with a passion for crafting delightful user experiences. With a PhD in human-computer interaction and years of experience leading teams at some of the world’s most innovative companies, Nesrine is an expert in product strategy, AI-driven experiences, and emotional design.
She shares her insights through her Substack newsletter and speaks at conferences worldwide, helping product teams create meaningful, impactful products.
👉 Follow Nesrine for more insights:
🔗 Newsletter
🔗 LinkedIn
🔗 Website
Preorder Nesrine’s book “Product Delight” here
Product Circle Chat - Q&A
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