Using Illustration as "Points of Delight" 

Unexpected Happiness in the Opus Application

When you're building an an enterprise application for a university, the last thing your users expect is a little bit of humor.  In this case, our users had to go through some data and "validate" it as correct.  Not a very fun task.  Perhaps it was such an un-fun task that people were extra surprised to see this happy little green modal after each successful validation. 

It was a little bit of a risk, as people at the university are used to their computer applications being very, very serious!  Unexpected delights happened outside work, when using Pinterest or MailChimp, but not in a university web site.  

But people loved seeing this little modal!  As I found out by reading the questions in our help desk, the users started calling it "the woooo."   "I didn't get the woooo."  or "I know I did it right because I saw the woooo."  or "I love the woooo!"

This little red error modal appeared when something went wrong in the validation process.  The message reassured the user that it wasn't their fault, took responsibility for the error, acknowledged the frustration it caused, and asked them to save again. 

Illustrations also let the users know what they can do on the site:

And what features are coming up next:

Although it was a little bit of a risk not to follow the serious tone of most university applications, the users really appreciated the unexpected "points of delight."  It made the experience a little bit more fun, a bit less serious, and made our software a lot more approachable.