Consistently Delightful

Great products are consistently delightful

Delightful products are intuitive to use and easy to explain to friends. They feel whimsical, playful, and powerful.

Consistent products deliver the same experience each time they’re used. Most products are either satisfactory, mediocre, or good. Any given product rarely falls into just one of these buckets; sometimes it’s satisfactory, other times mediocre. Very few products feel consistently delightful.

Consistently delightful products evoke a deep sense of love from their users. They become evangelists, much like missionaries spread religion. As a result, the best products spread like wildfire, via the most powerful form of advertising: word of mouth. Think about the products you enjoy most - odds are you heard about them from a friend.

Crafting great products starts with identifying a user’s pain point or friction, often something they may have already gotten used to, or are unconscious of. Solving a user’s problem and exceeding their expectations in a first impression is a sign of a delightful product. Consistently impressing that same user means the product is truly special: it’s consistently delightful. You know you’ve built a great product when users can’t get enough of it: a product’s greatness is highly correlated with how upset users would be if they couldn’t use it anymore.