delightful

Picture this: You receive a text message saying that your bank account is overdrawn and you are in the middle of procuring your life’s necessities (also known as grocery shopping). You know you have money in your savings, so you’ll just transfer $200.00 until your next payday. So you pull up your bank’s app/website and enter your username and password on the log in screen and press enter, nothing happens. How do you feel? Most likely a bit ticked off that you can’t access your hard earned money, correct?

Here is where a website’s functionality comes into play. The design of the website/report can make is rain silver and gold, but if you click a button that is supposed to log you in or load up another date on a report, the design of the website means nothing to you as a user. As a back end developer it is my job to make sure that every time you click, drag, or drop that the information you need is accessible and loads as quickly as humanely possible. To keep our users happy and smiling, I implement a functionality goal list in all of my programming projects:

When a user creates an event on a page:
1. Does it load correctly?
2. Does it load quickly?
3. Does it display the correct information?
If a page is to error out:
1. Does it display a message that says we will quickly fix this issue?
2. Does it display any coding that a user can use to hack our system?
Does it load correctly on all devices? (Meaning no cut off words, etc.)
1. Computer?
2. Mobile Phone?
3. Tablet?
Can something be done to speed up the final queries just a little bit more?
Can (2-3) users other than myself confirm that all of this works correctly as well?

If you can confirm that all of these actions pass your expectations, you will have a functional website or report on your hands.

Want to see this list in action? Check out any of our reporting pods in Car Wars, Service Setter, or any of our other platforms!

Aarron Walter, MailChimp’s user experience design lead, has developed an insightful model for what goes in to creating great software. Clearly a reskinning of the famed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Walter’s pyramid (as seen below) is a representation of the four basic user needs that must be considered when building software.

During my architectural studies at Texas A&M, we didn’t spend much time discussing pyramid construction, but I’m fairly sure that if the lower tiers are weak, the top tiers will crumble. That said, here is a quick breakdown of Walter’s model:

Functional – Above all, software has to actually function. A button titled “Outbound Activity” must actually load a report that displays outbound calling data.
Reliable – A user needs to know that the outbound calling data they are viewing is accurate and secure data.
Usable – This data must be organized to be quickly accessible and easy to understand.
Delightful – This is the key piece that Walter focuses on, and the piece that sets MailChimp apart from its competitors. Delightful software must appeal to the user on an emotional level, and produce an insightful and memorable experience.

Different members of Century Interactive’s dev team focus on different tiers of this pyramid within our products, and so I am going to kick of a short mini-series written by our different team members, focusing on how we strive to improve our functionality, reliability, usability, and delightfulness.

Here are the links to the posts for each topic: