Delight Innovation
Tuesday 20 April 2010 - Filed under computers
I’ve recently seen the concept of delight in software brought up in a couple different places, and I just wanted to cheer it on.
Jesper at waffle is starting an open-source web browser project to revive the spirit of OmniWeb, called rouse. He coins the phrase “delight innovation”. I love that phrase. He’s talking about taking a browser, something that’s relatively stable, and looking for ways to make it noticeably better again. I love that impulse – it’s something I’m hoping to see in email clients too.
Another place that delight showed up (along with Surprise and Joy), was at 52 weeks of UX in a post called “design for delight”. That post seemed to be a little more about the parts of design that don’t affect functionality, but do add personality. I really agree with this angle too – I like a program that has little details that are just for fun.
2010-04-20 » mike
20 April 2010 @ 2:32 pm
More often than not I think we’ve strayed so far from delight that merely coherent functionality is something over which you award top grades. I don’t want it to be like that. Everyone practically lives in a web browser, and it’s fine that rendering and layout and parsing and executing and security and privacy are all hard and essential problems for the major browser vendors, the ones driving the technology, to take care of.
There’s still room to deal with making it better for the person using the application. I don’t wish to come off as one of those “if it has more than 3% market share I don’t care for it” nerds, but I also recognize that the fellows who do write the major browsers are scared to death about dropping in market share because they changed something that goes deep with people. Not being so constrained, having something to mostly outright copy, being given the appropriate technology to embed in a product that we all know by heart. That’s a hell of an opportunity.
20 April 2010 @ 2:49 pm
Amen to that. In fact, I think it’d be a great goal for a platform to reach a point where it’s easy, and therefore commonplace, to have a multitude of solutions to the same problem, some of which can be mainstream and others can be quirky, personal, even art pieces.
I think the key is to safeguard user data – in a well-defined system framework, for instance – so that I can experiment with someone’s new vision of (say) a calendar program, without worrying about import & export headaches. With browsers this is certainly easier – even bookmarks are more often in the cloud now.