Delight, the Awesome Product Metric That Rules Them All Do your goods outshine the competition and instill fierce consumer loyalty?
By Kumar Srivastava Edited by Dan Bova
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Product success can be measured in numerous ways, including the rate of user signups, the number of popular features, the frequency of use and the duration of sessions. But the one metric that's hardest to measure but most significant is delight.
In short, delight produces long-lasting loyalty and passion in users. It persuades and convinces them to not only continue using a product but also encourage everyone around to do so, too.
Delightful products stand out from the competition. Often, such products have little to no advertising because it's not needed. These products are characterized by the ease of discovery, learning, use and reuse. Delightful products are talked about, tweeted about, shared and possess extensive word-of-mouth.
Related: 5 Ways to Dazzle and Delight Your Customers This Holiday Season
Members of a development team should understand what delight looks like. They need to postulate, hypothesize and understand what it would mean. They should determine how to detect the difference between a delighted user and an indifferent one.
The raison d'être of any product should be delighting the customer. The faster a product achieves this goal, the sooner it embeds itself into a user's work flow, creates a sticky consumer experience and makes it hard for the customer to walk away.
The moment when a user is delighted for the first time directly maps to when that person could be considered likely to convert into an engaged customer. Engagement is that point when the user has bought into the value proposition of the product and adopts it as a means to solving his or her problems.
Delight causes users to be transformed into a company's forward-marketing team. Fueled by euphoria, these users talk about the product to friends and family and on social media and their thoughts are circulated across their networks.
That same passion encourages customers to join the company's user communities, contributing best practices and support techniques to other users. Delighted users share the capabilities of a product that's pleased them (similar to cheat codes in gaming). This, in turn, spreads the delight to other users.
Related: 3 Memorable Ways to Launch a Product to Wow Customers
Creating sticky experiences.
If you're not sure which features are pleasing users, this doesn't mean there's no delight.
You might simply be missing the feedback loop that's required to capture that delight. Understand the types of features that are delighting users and those that are not, diagnose the root cause for delight or the lack thereof. It could be that you're targeting the wrong category of users, that your market is changing or a new unsupported use case is developing that your product is primed to serve.
Delight can restore users who abandoned your product or prevent ones on the brink of bailing from doing so and instead restore them as active users. Understanding what delights users is a great way of ensuring that other features can leverage these insights in the quest to be delightful. Piggybacking on top of delightful features (by connecting new features to proven ones) can make the whole product better.
Related: Creating Brand Joy. Disrupting With Purpose.
Resolving problems.
It's important to track problems, issues and outages. When users encounter problems while using your product that prevent them from completing what they have in mind or the item does not live up to its marketing promise and only barely delivers on customers' needs, the inverse of delight happens.
Understand whether a consumer's usage of a product drops after an outage or whether a change in an opinion coincides with a bug.
No products are devoid of issues. But building delightful features (and focusing on this metric) leads to an insurance policy of sorts. Delighted users are more likely to forgive mistakes or outages. Take a popular service like Gmail or Facebook. Outages happen but the delight factor that these products bring prompts users to easily forget them.
Measuring and optimizing for success.
The faster a user becomes delighted with your product, more likely he or she is to stick with it and look beyond any outages and problems. This is how companies like Apple have ended up with fanatical users who wait for weeks in line to get their hands on the next product. Users do seemingly unexplainable things when fueled by passion and delight.
So how does one measure delight? Start with auditing the capabilities of your product and identifying the set of features that map directly to its core value. Measure usage of these features, social mentions, reviews and support questions.
If delight is not spotted, you may have one of two problems. Either the set of features that you believe are central to your value proposition are not the right ones or you're measuring delight incorrectly. Go back and understand if you're addressing the needs of the users who matter and whether you have the right sensors in place to learn if these consumers are delighted.
