Satisfaction Isn’t The Goal

“Was your experience satisfactory?” the survey asked the user. If the answer is no, well, then we can work on making it better. But if it is yes, what do we do? Should we walk away happy with what just happened?

Satisfaction is a miserable place to stop our goal of constant improvement. Food that is satisfactory is just edible. It’s not particularly delicious. It’s just not awful. Edible is the place we stopped.

No self respecting restaurant chef would stop at cooking edible food. They’d want their food to go beyond satisfactory.

We need to push beyond user satisfaction to user delight. We should be asking “Was your experience delightful?” and not stop until we get a true and enthusiastic “Yes!” as our answer.