And that’s the sort of design sensibility we’ve seen throughout this chapter: clever copy, peppy music, the insistence that your memories must be rehashed and shared. All of it is based on the belief that true delight can be reduced to the digital equivalent of whipped cream in a can: a layer of fluffy sweetness sprayed on top of the experience. But as we’ve seen over and over, when teams laser-focus on delight, they lose sight of all the ways that fun and quirky design can fail—creating experiences that are dissonant, painful, or inappropriate.
