Surprise and Delight

I recently renamed this tumblog to reflect my new plan for it: as a repository for examples of great user experience, on the Web or wherever. Specifically, I believe that we’ve reached a point where many (most?) consumer-facing sites and other digital spaces get basic user experience right, more or less. You can buy something online, find a hotel or compare airfares, check your bank balance, stream music, look up movie times or sports scores, all without tearing your hair out or spending more time than you’d planned to. In fact, this has been the case for several years now, though it took a while (and a lot of work by smart people) to get to this point. But there are two caveats to this relatively happy state:

Being adequate isn’t really that much of an achievement; it’s to be lauded, but not celebrated.
There’s still plenty of bad UX out there

I want to explore the second point a little bit in a separate post, but the first point is going to be the focus of this blog. It used to be a sort of joke question among UXers: what happens when we’ve fixed all the bad and broken user experiences? Will we all be out of jobs? People first started asking that question back when it seemed that there was no limit to the number of bad sites out there, but now it’s a question that can be asked with a straight face, more or less. I’m interested in what comes after acceptable UX, and my feeling is that part of the answer is not just “great UX,” but beautiful UX, or UX that has the power to surprise and delight. I’ve been haphazardly collecting examples of experiences with those qualities for a few years now, and I’m going to start gathering them here.

And what are your nominations? Let me know!