are you delighted yet?
The first draft of this email has an opinion in it that is almost 180 degrees from the one I’m about to share:
Every chance we have to make little moments of delight in our products, is a chance we should take.
After reflecting on what I thought was silly advice — to seek customer delight — and having an almost allergic reaction to it, I started writing an argument against it.
But in doing so, I became convinced that actually, delight is what we should work towards. Even if delight in software is momentary and quickly forgotten. Fleeting.
So, given the chance to add some confetti or make someone smile another way, it’s best we take it and make the most of it. Together, these moments form something greater than the sum of their parts.
Let’s remember that as we build this year.
Peter
(152 / 500)
PS: The original draft is below.
When was the last time you were delighted by a piece of software? I mean really had “a feeling of great pleasure or enjoyment” when using a piece of software.
For me it was some AI image creator that used a bunch of headshots to forecast what I’d look like in 30, 40 years. To my honest delight it showed me looking A) like my dad and B) much more handsome than I deserve.
That was a mobile app. A toy. I deleted it after saving those images and moving on with my life.
I cannot recall the last time a piece of business software gave me true delight or joy. I bring this up because there’s a lot of business book advice about delighting your customers and I think it’s BS that makes too many people focus on building the wrong things.
Nobody is delighted by a 7-step product onboarding modal medley. No one I’ve spoken to is overjoyed at the chance to open ClickUp first thing Monday morning.
What I’ve experienced with software are moments of satisfaction.
As much as I love what I do, the tools I use are there to help me do my job. To accomplish something. It’s in that accomplishment that I get delight and joy and a sense of having done valuable work.
Even Hubspot waffles a bit on its definition of delight:
Customer delight is the process of exceeding a customer’s expectations to create a positive customer experience with your product or brand to improve loyalty.
It’s a “positive customer experience” we’re chasing, which sounds like a lower bar than delight. That means we don’t have to chase ethereal moments of great pleasure. We can build tools that give users a positive experience that exceeds their expectations, and that’s all they want.
Actually, all I usually want when I rent software is to get something done better. Yes, there may be moments of “delight” when something works well and the screen pops with confetti and I smile. But those moments exist once and then we become blind to them, maybe even annoyed by them….