Novelty budget
Delight is a budget. Spend it in three places and nowhere else, or it stops being delight and becomes noise.
In a dense professional tool the moments that may be a little celebratory are onboarding, the first success, and the completion of a long-running job. Anything expressive outside those is something I flag in review. View and page changes inside the product are instant, with new content fading in; there is no slide choreography between panels.
Consumer surfaces are different. A home screen may lead with mood and let controls recede until summoned, and a page may carry its own world. The cohesion contract there is navigation and controls, not sameness.
- Name the expressive moments up front; if a moment is not on the list, it is functional
- Enter softer than you think, exit softer than enter
- Stagger only infrequent, hierarchy-communicating entrances, about 100ms between chunks
When not to: a first run, a launch, an empty state. Those are the moments the budget exists for.