How we went beyond 'delight' to address Bharat users' emotional & social needs for a B2B client

I've begun to be irked by the concept of adding 'delight' to a product, when most products ignore the wider emotional and social needs of their users.

Delight is a superficial layer, often forced in, where users don't particularly care for it.
Emotional needs (or jobs) are specific to a segment, exist at the product level and at each step in the journey.

For example, when designing for a client with a B2B marketplace for Bharat, we talked to the small business owners to understand their unique emotional needs:

💙 Be respected for their good standing (in a low-trust industry)
✅ We brainstormed a reward/ratings programs for good track record

💙 Get justice when they lose a bid for an order and perceive it as unfair
✅ We started showing the reason they lost the bid, gave feedback, along with pointing them to other available orders

💙 Be able to trust that their 'digital' bid is treated as important (in an ecosystem where personal relationship is everything)
✅ We launched a system that gave immediate feedback and regular updates to each bid

💙 Feel valued for their loyalty to our company (in a competitive, network-based landscape)
✅ We launched a loyalty program (also aimed to grow retention of course)

💙 Feel proud for their English skills even if more comfortable in a local language
✅ We added various affordances across the product to support those using the app in English over native languages

Simultaneously, we spent time designing many variations of nice, desi illustrations, animations and motifs, hoping to create an emotional connect with the brand. I can confidently say that while it helped, it was the least effective of the lot, in generating positive feelings towards the brand.

All of this is important for any product, but it's downright invaluable when building for user-bases that currently rely on informal social contracts, and whose emotional and cultural needs are significantly different from those doing the building.