Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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Stop Sprinkling Joy: Integrating Delight into the Core Loop | Episode 440

 

Exploring gamification for your product or org? Let’s chat → professorgame.com/chat

We sit down with product leader and author Nesrine Changuel to explore the behavioral science of “Product Delight.” Nesrine pulls from her extensive experience at tech giants like Google and Spotify to explain why emotional connection cannot be treated as an afterthought in product design. By distinguishing between purely functional requirements and deep emotional motivators, she reveals how features like Google Chrome’s inactive tabs or Spotify’s curated playlists solve core psychological needs rather than just technical problems. You can walk away with actionable frameworks for removing user friction, anticipating needs, and asking the ultimate design question: “If my product were a human, how would the experience be better?”

Nesrine is a product coach, trainer, speaker, and author the author of Product Delight Book. With a background in research and over a decade of product experience, she has built products used by millions like Google Chrome, Google Meet, Spotify, and Skype. Nesrine is known for her focus on emotional connection and user delight. Today, she helps teams create products people don’t just use, but truly love.

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Nesrine Changuel (00:00)
I want to share a quick story from Google Chrome. I had to work on one of the toughest challenge, which is tab management. I realized that there is a huge relationship between customers and their tabs. Some users would tell something like, don’t close my tabs. Don’t even dare touching my tabs. People felt guilty showing a tab grid that is extremely busy. Like some users would say something like, ⁓

Sorry, I usually don’t have so many tabs open. And that’s a feeling or an emotion of shame that we wanted to remove.

Rob (00:38)
Engagers, welcome back to the Professor Game Podcast, the number one gamification podcast where we explore our games, gamification, game thinking and other behavioral design strategies help us boost engagement, multiply retention and build stronger products. I’m Rob, I’m the founder and coach of Professor Game and I’m also the head of engagement strategy Europe at the Octalysis Group, the leading gamification consultancy. And I’m a professor of gamification and game-based solutions at top business school institutions like IE Business School, EFMD, EBS University and many others around the world.

Before we dive into today’s conversation, remember if you’re having any of these issues like retention, bringing people in, maybe even introducing some fun into your products, definitely give us a call, give us a chat. Just click on the link below and we will get you covered for sure. And today we have a very special guest in many different ways. This all started with a LinkedIn conversation of all places. Conversation, discussion depends on who you ask, right? But today we have Nesrine, but Nesrine.

We want to know, you prepared to engage?

Nesrine Changuel (01:41)
Let’s do it.

Rob (01:43)
Nezrin is a product coach, trainer, speaker, and the author of Product Delight book. She has a background in research and over a decade of product experience that she has built products used by millions like Chrome, Meet, Spotify, and Skype. She is known for her focus on emotional connection and user delight. And today she helps teams create products people don’t just use, but truly love. So you can realize very quickly why Nezrin is with us today. She has

Results that look something that might be similar to what we typically discuss and we’ll get into that for sure But Nesrine is there anything we’re missing from that intro that the engagement should know before we dive into questions

Nesrine Changuel (02:22)
You did an amazing introduction.

Rob (02:27)
Great. And talking about talking about you, what does a regular day or week look like? What are the kinds of things you’re doing nowadays?

Nesrine Changuel (02:36)
Okay. Explaining what a product manager do is already hard, but explaining what a product coach do, honestly, I gave up explaining that to my parents. They know I’m enjoying it, but maybe I can give a try here for our audience. So actually I’ve been a product manager and product leader for almost 15 years, as you said, and I left the corporate world about 18 months ago. And I’ve been touching and doing different things.

My very first period was about writing the book. So I dedicated an entire nine full months. It’s funny. It’s like having a baby.

Rob (03:13)
Fully blown

Nesrine Changuel (03:15)
So nine full months within the writing, the publishing and the editing part. But then the book was now published about five months ago. And so far I’m of course doing a lot of ⁓ training. I’m teaching on two sides. I’m actually teaching on the academic side because something that you missed in the intro is that I’m teaching MBA students here in Paris. So I’m teaching product management for our next generation leaders, for MBA students.

But also I’m teaching corporate training. So I’m teaching this method that I’m calling product delight. And we’re going to dive into that to many industries and many organizations. And I’m impressed by how diverse companies are interested in product delight. It’s not a B2C thing, specific. It’s something that could touch so many industries and so many companies. So I’m alternating between teaching academia and teaching corporate work.

Rob (04:12)
Amazing, amazing. Sounds really, really interesting for sure. Nesrine, talking about product delights and this methodology that you’ve discussed in your book, but I’m sure it’s something that either formally or informally came well before that and that you’ve been doing well before. Has there been a time when you were going for that kind of thing and things didn’t really go well? I’m sure, you know, especially with the product mentality, then you came out of it, iterated and whatnot.

But we want to be there in that story, that difficult moment, then, you know, as well figure out what was a good strategy to make it better or actually make it a feature almost.

Nesrine Changuel (04:48)
So of course there are opportunities or times where things doesn’t necessarily go as you expect, but maybe to explain that the best way is to give our audience a better understanding of how I get to that. they better understand what we mean about what the light is and also what the light doesn’t mean like as well.

I’ve been wearing different hats as a product leader. I sometimes has been operating in spaces and organization where I’ve been sitting on extremely busy backlogs with competing priorities. But there was one time of my career and that’s specific to Google Meet. When I joined Google Meet, was the PM.

Rob (05:30)
Just

one thing, backlog for those of you who might not know, backlog is that list of things that you mean to do at some point and that you have to prioritize as a product manager as well.

Nesrine Changuel (05:40)
Of course, thanks for presiding. So as a product manager, something that you own and it’s your baby is this backlog or think about it as a list of to-do features. And what happened as a product manager is there’s always a competition between these features. What should we ship first? What should we prioritize, et cetera. And there was a time of my career, as I said, in product, as a product manager at Google Meet, I was the PM for the light.

That was a special moment of my career because that’s when I realized that the light is not a buzzword. It’s not a magic. It’s intentional and it very much depends on clear ways of working and clear processes. And there is a real thing. It’s intentional and it’s actionable. So that’s where I realized that we can build product that connect emotionally with customers and connect emotionally with users.

So since we’re talking about problem, the biggest problem when it comes to product delight is that if we’re not a specific delight PM, we end up down prioritizing these things. I mean, we always have this tendency of prioritizing must haves and pure functional features. And who knows, maybe one time during the year, we will get a sprint or a week where we can prioritize the light. And that’s the biggest mistake, honestly, because…

we will end up not having that time, to be honest. We are so busy building functional features. So if we want to do it right, I mean, we’re going to talk about that, of course. The most important thing is to embrace it as a culture and make sure that it is the way to build product. It’s not like a sprinkling joy on top of utility. It’s about having it as part of the process.

And that’s why I ended up creating this Delight model as a framework.

Rob (07:31)
Is there, like, I love that and how specific you went into how, you know, that moment where you realized all this. Is there a time when, you know, maybe even on the opposite side where you realized that the light was not being brought in and that generated a problem? Again, I know there’s NDAs, past workers, but whatever you can reveal from, from any of these stories is always useful for the audience.

Nesrine Changuel (07:52)
So when we talk about delight, we talk about emotions. So in product, I talk about it from a delight perspective, but the global topic is emotional connection. What we want to achieve is to create a tech products that create emotional connection with the customers. So, and that’s hard, that’s tough because we know exactly how to build technical features, but we don’t necessarily know how we can touch people’s emotions. And the problem with emotional connection is that what makes you happy is not necessarily what makes me happy.

And even myself, I might be happy with a feature or functionality that won’t have any effect, emotional effect on me next week. So the biggest challenge when it comes to creating emotional connection is inclusiveness. How can we be inclusive with emotion? How can we make sure that we have this positive emotional impact on all users? And we tried our best and sometimes it did work really well and sometimes it just didn’t work as expected. So maybe I can share.

An example from Google Meet time, when I joined Google Meet, the very first task that I was assigned is to understand the emotional impact of the new behavior that we all found ourselves in in the COVID time. So we moved from having meetings in offices to a hundred percent remote. And this new behavior had impact and an emotional impact. So what’s this emotional impact was my task for the first couple of months. And so we went away and.

We tried to come up with create opportunities that create that positive emotional impact. Some of them, of course, are the background replace was one of the features that we built first, but then we wanted to enhance that experience. So we added masks and we added like effects as well. And we quickly realized that some of these effects might have not necessarily the positive emotional impact that we wanted. So we at least tried.

But at some, sometimes it did work, sometimes it didn’t work. And some of the features that exist today on Google Meet are several trial of things that didn’t work well during the experimentation time.

Rob (10:03)
love it. And I love, you know, that, that whole perspective of, know, it’s, it’s something we talk about in gamification a lot as well, which is this is not something you sprinkle on top of something else. Because when you, when you do it that way, it essentially loses, you know, 95 or more percent of its, potential essentially. And I think when you’re talking about that emotional connection and you talk about being focused on functions and the Octauses framework, there’s one thing that Yuhkai has always talked about, which is

function focused design, which is when you focus on what the product is able to do versus when you focus, of course the function still needs to be there, but when you focus on what is driving the motivation of your user, there are two separate things nowadays in AI. This is something that we see a lot. AI is able to do all these things, but who wants to do it? Why would I want to engage in that is a big, big, big question that many of the times it still remains unanswered. Although don’t get me wrong. I know there’s huge adoption and all of that.

The potential, the gap between that potential and where it’s at is definitely a motivational one, perhaps a one of delight as well.

Nesrine Changuel (11:08)
Absolutely.

I mean, it might be a bit surprising, but our users use the same product for different reasons. We call them motivators exactly how we called it. So think about Spotify, for example. As you said, I mean, our users do have some functional motivators. Think about them. I want to listen to music. I want to listen to podcasts. I want to create a playlist. I want to listen offline. All these are functional motivators.

At the same time, there are other emotional motivators. Think about them. I want to feel less lonely or I want to feel immersed or I want to change my mood or I want to feel entertained. So these are also emotional motivators. if the product, want you to think for a moment, if the product is only honoring functional motivators, the product will work. I mean, it will function, but it will not have that effect.

that make people love Spotify. Like people love Spotify, not just use Spotify, they love Spotify because there is a satisfaction of the emotional motivators as well, not only the functional motivators.

Rob (12:13)
That’s

what keeps people coming back because if it’s only function, somebody else can do the same thing. I mean, yes, there are some royalty models and there’s some places where you kind of protect your business. That is always limited. It can always come in, you know, they always talk about, this is the Airbnb for, well, that can always come in Airbnb even for the disrupted models like what Spotify created and many, many others as well. You’re not protecting, you don’t have a real moat unless people love your product and are

you know, coming back because they want to come back for sure. So, Nesrin, is there actually let’s rotate, you know, I talked about a failure. We always like to start with that emotional roller coaster of the difficulties as well. But actually it was something where it actually did work. It went really well where you’re, you know, your approach to the light really worked and what were the results, anything you want to share? It’s that kind of question.

Nesrine Changuel (12:44)
Absolutely.

Yes. So something that you touched and you explained quite well earlier is the fact that when we’re building a feature, the most important part that we need to start with is to identify our customers and to know very well our customers. And we call this segmentation. guess many people are already aware about this technique. So we segment our customers into different segments. There are different ways of doing segmentations. There is the demographic segmentation. It’s about the who are they.

There’s a much better one, which is called the behavioral segmentation. It’s very much related to the, are they doing with the product or what do they really need? And the third type of segmentation, which for me is the very best one, is the motivational segmentation. It’s very much related to the, why do they use the product? Why do they need the products? That’s something that we got obsessed about. So while building products, both at Spotify, but also at Google, I was obsessed about identifying the different whys.

And I want to share a quick story from Google Chrome. So when I was a product leader at Google Chrome, I had to work on one of the toughest challenge when it comes to Google Chrome. Like I think there’s nothing harder to solve, which is tab management. So I know from data and we’ve seen that quite a lot that most of our customers do have hundreds of tabs open. And I’m referring to the mobile app by the way. Guilty.

People are opening tabs, they don’t close them. Sometimes they don’t close them at all. mean, it depends on the type of usage, of course, but some people use tabs that they continuously open tabs on their mobile. Even if we invite them to close, they end up having thousands of tabs open sometimes.

Rob (14:49)
There’s people

who are not even aware that they’re not closing their tabs.

Nesrine Changuel (14:52)
Absolutely.

Definitely. Of course, from a technical perspective, that’s not ideal. mean, that slows down the app, it takes memory, it slows performance. Think about it. I’m referring to people having thousands of tabs open, not three or 15. So of course, from a technical perspective, it’s not ideal. We wanted to solve that challenge, even if we knew that it’s really hard. So instead of jumping into technical solutions, what we did was to…

sit with the customers, sit with a couple of users and ask them to navigate through their tab grid and maybe try to open a tab through their tab grid to understand how it works. And that exercise for me was eye opening because I realized that there is a huge relationship between customers and their tabs. I mean, and I’m referring to relationship with a big R because some users would tell something like, don’t close my tabs. Don’t even dare touching my tabs. I mean, there is a, there is a

very tight connection between the usage of tabs and the experience itself. So we understood that that’s something that we will never do. We will never close tabs on people’s behalf. But also we understood something else. People felt guilty showing a tab grid that is extremely busy. Like some users would say something like, sorry, I usually don’t have so many tabs open or something like that. And that’s a feeling or an emotion of shame.

that we wanted to remove. So the reason why I’m sharing this story is because it’s really important to take the time to understand why users are doing such behavior or why are they using the product that way. And also think about how can I improve the experience in a way that people feel better about themselves and have positive emotion while using the product rather than like feeling of shame or frustration or whatever other negative emotions. So of course we ended up

having multiple users in the view. And one of the features that we built toward the end was it’s a feature called inactive tabs. So inactive tabs are tabs that has not been opened for more than 21 day, and they are placed in a group in the tab grid. And so for people, they feel relieved because they only see number of active tabs. I know it’s a fake feeling of being organized, but at least they are feeling better.

while using the product. So this is one of the examples that we try to solve, not only from a functional perspective. We could have like a compressed thumbnail and found a technical solution for that, but we also realized that there is a need to make people feel good while using the product.

Rob (17:33)
make sense. You’ve talked about this, you kind of introduced how you view these things. Is there some kind of process that you follow when you’re going to introduce the light? How does that work in a product management perspective or even if you get out of that, how does introducing the light look like more broadly?

Nesrine Changuel (17:50)
So I think it’s really important to understand there are different types of delight. In my book, I’m categorizing them into three categories. So we started this conversation saying that people do have some functional needs and they do have some emotional needs. For every type of product, by the way, even a B2B product, there are some emotional needs. People want to feel in control. They want to feel safe. They want to feel, I mean, there is a set of emotions that need to be identified.

So if a feature is only solving for a functional need, then we call this category of features, low delight. So it is needed, it has to function there, but there is absolutely no impact on emotion. If a feature is only solving for emotional need and there’s absolutely no functional need in that, that’s called surface delight. Think about the confetti effect or the other day I have an Apple watch, it was my birthday.

It popped it up with balloons saying happy birthday in the stream. That’s surface delight because it’s very much related to giving me a smile or making me feel happy maybe, but there’s absolutely no connection with functionality. The third type, which for me is the most impactful one, is called deep delight. This is when a feature make you feel good, but at the same time solving for the function. So when the two dimensions meet together, like the…

functional need and the emotional need are met within the same functionality, that’s deep delight. And so to answer your question about what’s the process, I think the very, very first step that should not be missed and that every product builder have to do is to identify those emotional motivators and those functional motivators from the start. So remember we spoke about the Spotify example. If you’re building

a product like Spotify or any other type of product, you need to start by having a spreadsheet where you’re listing all the functional motivators and all the emotional motivators. That’s the starting point. Why it’s important? Because later on when you’re ideating or identifying solutions, you need to map these solutions to those motivators and see if you’re solving for the right need.

And are you including emotional motivators in your solutions or not at all?

Rob (20:14)
Interesting, interesting. It’s a way of, you know, it’s, it’s the way of approaching your brainstorming that is mapping out to, those, to those functional or emotional needs. I’ve heard many times, there was a study, I’m trying to remember exactly what it was about why, for example, to get out of the ones that you, you already mentioned, for example, why do people, well, nowadays it’s probably changed. Why do people open Facebook? Right.

Or when do you open Facebook? When do you open X? Now X used to be Twitter. And when do you open, I don’t know, Instagram? And it was like, one of them was when you’re feeling bored. So you just open it up and try to entertain yourself. Another, you open, or even email, you open email when you want to feel busy and you’re not feeling busy. You just open your email and see what’s up or you want to feel productive. Like all of these things were mapped out in that study. I’m trying to remember where I saw that, but it’s exactly that. You’re mapping out.

That was probably more from the perspective of the phone, the mobile phone builders, or even from somebody building a new product saying, well, all these things are mapped this way. Can I insert myself in one of these or can I create a new one? Like when people feel this other thing, they have nothing to do with that feeling. How about I create a product for that? So very, very interesting. love that, that perspective for sure. Is there, is there a, you mentioned that very first step and something nobody should jump. Maybe it’s exactly that, but.

Is there some sort of best practice when introducing to light into your interior?

Nesrine Changuel (21:42)
Yes, I think there are three pillars, but this is how I’m defining them as well in my book. When you’re thinking about building the light, think about these three pillars. The first pillar is about how can I use this opportunity to remove friction? So the first pillar is about removing friction. It means that think about your user journey and identify these valley moments. What I call valley moments are those moments where people are feeling not well or not feeling good.

These are moments of frustration or feeling being bored or feeling unexcited or lost, whatever kind of negative emotion. so identify these valid moments and take them as product opportunities for delight and try to remove friction. So that’s the first pillar. The second pillar that is extremely important is anticipating needs. It’s not about honoring needs. It’s not about satisfying customers’ requests.

It’s about anticipating those needs and being proactive because in the light there is this concept of surprise. We want to give users a positive surprise. If you’re honoring users’ needs, you’re not surprising them. You’re just giving them what they want. So think about how can I anticipate those needs? A very interesting example for this pillar could be Revolut. Are you familiar with Revolut app, like the bank app?

Rob (23:06)
Me personally, yes, I use it, but maybe the engagers are not as familiar. It’s a banking app essentially where you have all sort of banking needs being fulfilled in different ways.

Nesrine Changuel (23:17)
Yeah. I mean, the way how it started, it started as a money exchange. mean, currency exchange. was very basic, but they quickly realized that most of their customers are expat. They are travelers. So they went now with so many features that meet international customers’ requests. So the other day I was in Singapore and I realized that I can use an eSIM from my Revolut app, which is just insane. I’m not expecting to get an eSIM from my bank.

So that’s the second pillar. It’s about anticipating needs. The third pillar is about exceeding expectation. It’s not about meeting expectation, but it’s about exceeding expectation. How can they build a solution that goes beyond, that would give that surprise and make it even more positive? So these are the three, I would say, best practices. It’s about anticipating need, exceeding expectation, and removing friction from the product experience.

Rob (24:14)
Amazing, amazing. Very, very interesting and useful. And Nazanin, I’m sure you’ve had plenty of inspiration from different places. After hearing some of the, the way we’ve interacted here, some of the questions, is there somebody you’d be curious to listen to? Whether it’s somebody who’s already inspired you, somebody you’re looking at following, I don’t know, or nowadays with AI, maybe even we’ll do an interview of somebody who’s not around anymore, trying to gather from their work. I don’t know. Is there, is there anything in that, in that regard?

Nesrine Changuel (24:42)
Honestly, I’m a big fan of everything related to emotion and everything that create product that doesn’t feel like robots. Cause I’m a bit afraid with AI coming that we end up only focusing on. No, no, I’m very positive. I’m not pessimistic. However, the problem is that AI is making building extremely easy and the functional part is becoming extremely accessible, which means that there is a huge trap of only building.

functional needs and forgetting about the emotional need and we end up having robotic product. However, to answer your question, I’m a big fan of how we’re, Lovable is being built these days. So Lovable is this AI prototyping company that are humanizing the way we are building tech products. And that’s exactly what I love in their way of doing. So Elena, for example, the head of growth at Lovable is talking a lot about

minimum lovable product instead of minimum viable products. So we’ve been talking for a long time about minimum viable product, which is the minimum, the smallest piece of feature that you can ship for the product for the users so they can start using it. But Elena is talking about minimum lovable products. How can you ship the smallest feature that will create love among your customers? And that’s a nice shift that I’m a big fan and I think it’s really inspiring.

to follow this kind of recommendation.

Rob (26:13)
Absolutely. love that minimum lovable product. We’ve been with that. I’ve been using lately. We talk about game loops a lot in when we’re designing. And one of the things I’ve been talking about is minimum viable game loop. Because of course, you can always like loops can be super complicated. If you look at any AAA game, there’s used to, you know, it’s all these complicated things happening, but it’s always a loop of coming back, coming back, coming back. So we’ve been talking about if you had to take that huge thing, what is the minimum thing, the core of it, where you can have

a loop that people come back to and it’s how do you build that? In this case, it’s how to build something that people love to come back to. I love the perspective for sure. And continuing with that inspiration, is there of course, right next to product delight book? Is there another book that we would definitely have or you would definitely recommend us to have in libraries next to yours?

Nesrine Changuel (27:03)
Yeah. So within this spirit of emotion, I’m a big fan of a book called Emotional Design by Dan Norman. By the way, emotional design is not a new topic. It’s been very well described, very well used. mean, designers are big fan of the emotional design. It’s been proven to be the most impactful way of designing products. The problem nowadays is that what happens is that designers are convinced about

building for emotion. Marketers, by the way, are very much convinced about marketing for emotion. mean, think about Coca-Cola and how they are doing their marketing campaign. It’s all about emotions. And what happened is that in between you have engineers, you have product leaders, and you have business people who only cares about KPI, OKRs, and metrics. And we end up losing that goal. And so my, my, let’s say, objective of writing product delight was to put these people all at the same level.

so that they speak the same language, they are familiar by the same vocabulary, and they achieve the same goal and remove that friction and frustration across function. So I’m a huge fan of emotional design book, and I think product-delight complement that book from a business and a product perspective.

Rob (28:23)
Amazing, amazing. Thank you very much. sounds like a very good recommendation. think he’s also the creator of this other book, designer of everyday things maybe.

Nesrine Changuel (28:34)
Yes, yes.

Rob (28:35)
So you might’ve heard of Dawn as well from that. didn’t know about this book from Dawn Norman. And in this whole product world and maybe even in this product, Delight The World, which I think would be a lot more your area, what would you say is your superpower? What’s that thing that you do at least better than most other people? ⁓

Nesrine Changuel (28:56)
superpower that I’m happy to share today so people can use the same superpower and build more powerful products. Something that I think can allow you to build product that stand out is to ask the following question. To ask the question, if my product was a human, how would the experience would be better? I’m going to repeat the question. If my product was a human being, how would the experience would be better?

I’ve been applying this question almost every time I’m building a feature and it’s a small reflection, but it can level up and completely upgrade your product in a complete new dimension. Let me give you an example. The other day I was talking to the VP of product from Dyson, you know Dyson, the vacuum cleaner company. And I actually asked Andy, like Andy is the VP of product, like, Hey Andy, how the hell do I love my Dyson, my vacuum cleaner? It’s vacuum cleaner.

I love it. I’m proud of having it. I’m hanging it on the entrance. I’m proud showing it to my guests. Like, come on, there’s something wrong in me here or what? And he said something quite interesting. He actually told me that while building their robots and their machines, they don’t compare their robots to competitors like Electrolux or Bosch or whatever other brand. They are obsessed about comparing their robots.

What if you hire a real person to come and clean your house? So if you think that way, they started to think, okay, if you hire a real person, you might ask that person to clean in certain way or to start with a certain room that our robot do not have so far. So they added like recommendation, they added these spirits into their robots. And if you think that way, you will compare your product to the best case, which is hiring the right person.

And honestly, I also did that a lot at Google Meet because we almost never compared Google Meet to Zoom or Teams or whatever, like a factory machine they’re having there. We were obsessed about what if we’re having this meeting in the same room now? If let’s imagine no digital solution at all. We’re having the same meeting in a room physically. How would the experience would be better? If you think that way, you will come up with crazy features like hand raise or

emoji reactions or whatever thing that you would react as a human being. So that’s, think the tip or advice I’m sharing today is to think about if my product was a human, how would the experience would be better and try to upscale your product accordingly.

Rob (31:31)
Amazing, amazing. Love that. Love that perspective and that question in general. Zerreen, we come to a question we always make to guests, which is, what would you say is your favorite game? And I know this is not your typical space. I don’t know. Which games do you enjoy the most, perhaps?

Nesrine Changuel (31:52)
I’m a big game player, but board game player. I have two small kids. I try to make sure that they are familiar with playing with cards and with boards. So we play a lot with games. I think it’s fun time, of course, but I don’t play digital, digitally so far. Try to, even if I have some temptations sometimes, but due to their low age, I want to show them that we can have fun physically as well.

So I’m a big fan of Dixit or a big fan of Sushigo. I mean, these are my favorite games, but I’m sorry I’m gonna disappoint you, but no digital games so far.

Rob (32:29)
No disappointment at all. In fact, my daughter’s three years old and you know, now in school they do have some screens. was this European policy at some point of digitalizing everything. So now pretty much every school has some form of digital screens. So we tried to run away from it unsuccessfully, I have to say. So she has some form of screen at school. It’s very limited. That’s something we’re thankful for.

But at home, she literally, she sees a TV and she doesn’t know what it looks like when you turn it on. She’s never ever seen it turned on with us. So we do, we have started three years old. It’s a different stage. So we started introducing board games for sure. And I love them. have a collection of board games as well. So no disappointment at all, Nesrine. It’s actually a very nice surprise. Nesrine, we’re running out of time, but I wanted to let…

Make sure that if you want to point this into any webpage, any resource or anything at all, or anything of course that you want to say before we take off.

Nesrine Changuel (33:26)
Yeah, so first, thanks for having me. I know it’s a topic that is not very much spoken about when it comes to humanizing product, creating emotional connection, but I feel like it’s so much needed and even more and more needed in the coming weeks and coming months. Because again, I already said it, we should make sure that we create the balance and not only because it’s easy and fast to build that we skip the emotional part.

I’m happy to be the one helping you with that. course, people can find more resources on my website. It’s nisreen.changel.com. They can find more resources about that. But also, since I started talking about delight, a lot of people are sharing their stories because every delightful feature is a story to tell. So people like spontaneously share stories to me and I’m happy to get your stories, of course. I started this sub-stack newsletter recently. It’s called Delight Tips. So if people want to… ⁓

subscribe feel free to and I share these delightful stories from time to time when people allow me to do. Yeah but otherwise reach out to me on LinkedIn I’m quite available and I’m happy to support you in any way.

Rob (34:37)
Amazing. Thank you very much Nesrine for investing some of your time here.

talking about these very important topics with the Engagers. However, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Engagers, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game podcast. And since you’re interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty, using game-inspired solutions, how about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game on school? You can find the link right below.

in the description. But the main thing is to click there and join us. It’s a platform called School is for Free and you’ll find plenty of resources there. We’ll be up to date with everything that we’re doing, any opportunities that we might have for you. And of course, before you go on to your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.

 

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