Experiencing Delightful Content

In this 2013 talk, Jared Spool, founder of UIE and a researcher and educator on usability and design, questions how teams talk about content. Designers often say “We’ll need more content” or “This is where the content will go,” as if content is what users are looking for. Yet when users are frustrated, they rarely use that word.

His example is iOS 6 Maps: users didn’t say “the content is broken” when the app placed their home address in a nearby river. Users experience content very differently from designers, content strategists and developers. For them, it is all about the details of the experience.

That means teams need to learn how to put delight into the experience of content, not just fill pages with it. The idea connects to delighters in the UI-Patterns.com library.