Building for Joy in the Digital World

User experience of digital platforms and technologies tends to be quite ‘thin’, characterized by low-quality engagements such as addictive tendencies or browsing on autopilot. In this paper, we take an interdisciplinary approach to identifying more cognitive and active dimensions of ‘thick’ user experience, introducing a new design and User Experience framework which is centred around the notion of joy. We consider existing frameworks which focus on dimensions such as delight, happiness, satisfaction, pleasure, adoption, and retention. We argue that many harmful kinds of engagement either do not impact negatively on these assessments, or even result in higher scores. We explain how we are working at developing measurements that operationalize different dimensions of joy, drawing from a series of case studies of different digital platforms and applications.