We want to build software that is not only useful, but is loved. Working software solves an intended problem. Successful software attracts passionate fans.
Some of us, in planning our works, are intentional about this aim and set aside time to build “delighters” into our products. Does that work? Before the lagging indicators of success arrive (or don’t), can you measure delight? Can we even define this term?
A first form of delight is the surprise behavior that adds a small convenience or reveals a taste of personality. You might have been delighted the first time you had a productivity tool turn “[X]” into “✅” or perhaps when you found support for emoji and gifs in software that’s usually all business 👔. These will most often be intentional moments of delight — features built with a preconceived idea of “this will please our users”.
Another form of delight involves an element of surprise coupled with user directed discovery of how to accomplish a goal. It is the experience of finding that the thing you want to do with a piece of software has already been considered — as if the authors knew you, knew your needs, built what you wanted, and provided you with hints to allow you to discover the feature just at the moment when you realized you needed it. These result from great design, strong product practices, and empathy. I suspect these are rarely the result of a team building an intentional “delighter”. Instead they result from the design of the software embedding a deep understanding of its users and providing a coherence in the implementation that enables users to uncover their own unique delight-paths through the product. While there’s no sure-fire recipe, delivering this form of delight is correlated with user research, UX design, intentional discover, and product engineering practices like user story mapping.
Lastly, there’s a higher-order delight that is detached from a specific feature. It is the sense of appreciation of the whole, like a work of art. This is a high bar or at least an unusual perspective -- how many users consider software as art and pause to enjoy it? But like other human made things, we can marvel at a piece of software like a well-built engine in a car or a tightly crafted sentence in a book. These are not achieved with an intention to delight, but through dedication to the craft, moments of flow, and the effort of refining and revisiting your work.