Using the Kano Model to Build Delightful UX

In this 2013 talk, Jared Spool, founder of UIE, takes apart the Kano Model to show why it is such a useful tool for designers. The model was created in the 1980s by Noriaki Kano, a Japanese expert in customer satisfaction and quality management, and Spool’s team came across it years ago while studying his writing.

The Kano Model predicted how users reacted as the key elements of Flickr’s personalised homepage spread to other websites: why users were delighted at first, and why that delight faded over time. Spool walks through the model piece by piece so designers can understand why it works and how to use it.

The fading of delight is closely related to hedonic adaptation, and both connect to the delighters pattern in the UI-Patterns.com library.