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Delightful is the new black
What is this “delight” stuff, anyway?
Delight is a bit hard to pin down; it’s more one of those “I’ll know it when I
feel it” kind of things. Rather than a definition, it’s probably easier to
identify some of the words people use when describing delightful products:
fun, surprising, impressive, captivating, clever, and even magical.
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My personal standard for a delightful app tends to be “does something you would have been
burned at the stake for a few hundred years ago.”
Delightful apps usually come from marrying an idea about something people
would really enjoy being able to do, but don’t imagine is possible, with a
bright idea about how to use some new technology to accomplish it.
SoundHound is a perfect example.
Not only can it identify that song that you hear playing wherever you happen
to be, but it can display the lyrics and scroll them in sync with the song.
And Paper is not your average drawing app. Instead of dozens of tools with
thousands of options, you get five tools with no options. And each one is
optimized to create things that look good.
Building delight into mobile apps has become increasingly important
because the app market is so competitive. Just doing something well isn’t
good enough to create a hit; you have to do something incredibly well.
Delight is sort of like the extra credit assignment of user experience design.
Making your app delightful is a fine objective. Just don’t focus so much
attention on it that you forget to make it usable, too.
Apps need to be learnable
One of the biggest problems with apps is that if they have more than a few
features they may not be very easy to learn.
Take Clear, for example. It’s an app for making lists, like to-do lists. It’s
brilliant, innovative, beautiful, useful, and fun to use, with a clean minimalist
interface. All of the interactions are elegantly animated, with sophisticated
sound effects. One reviewer said, “It’s almost like I’m playing a pinball
machine while I’m staying productive.”
The problem is that one reason it’s so much fun to use is that they’ve come
up with innovative interactions, gestures, and navigation, but there’s a lot to
learn.
With most apps, if you get any instructions at all it’s usually one or two
screens when you first launch the app that give a few essential hints about
how the thing works. But it’s often difficult or impossible to find them again
to read later.
And if help exists at all (and you can find it), it’s often one short page of text
or a link to the developer’s site with no help to be found or a customer
support page that gives you the email address where you can send your
questions.
This can work for apps that are only doing a very few things, but as soon as
you try to create something that has a lot of functionality—and particularly
any functions that don’t follow familiar conventions or interface guidelines
—it’s often not enough.
The people who made Clear have actually done a very good job with
training compared to most apps. The first time you use it, you tap your way
through a nicely illustrated ten-screen quick tour of the main features.
This is followed by an ingenious tutorial that’s actually just one of their lists.
Each item in the list tells you something to try, and by the time you’re done
you’ve practiced using almost all of the features.
But when I’ve used it to do demo usability tests during my presentations, it
hasn’t fared so well.
I give the participant/volunteer a chance to learn about the app by reading
the description in the app store, viewing the quick tour, and trying the
actions in the tutorial. Then I ask them to do the type of primary task the app
is designed for: create a new list called “Chicago trip” with three items in it
— Book hotel, Rent car, and Choose flight.
So far, no one has succeeded.
Even though it’s shown in the slide show on the way in, people don’t seem
to get the concept that there are levels: the level of lists, the level of items in
lists, and the level of settings. And even if they remember seeing it, they still
can’t figure out how to navigate between levels. And if you can’t figure that
out, you can’t get to the Help screens. Catch-22.
That’s not to say that no one in the real world learns how to use it. It gets
great reviews and is consistently a best seller. But I have to wonder how
many people who bought it have never mastered it, or how many more sales
they could make if it were easier to learn.
And this is a company that’s put a lot of effort into training and help. Most
don’t.
You need to do better than most, and usability testing will help you figure
out how.
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