Keeping delight in view when the numbers are loud

Coming from the chief executive of Zynga, the line reads as a note to self. Zynga, maker of FarmVille, Mafia Wars and a string of other games played inside Facebook, is known for measuring nearly everything its players do. New features are tested against retention and revenue, and the ones that move the numbers stay. FarmVille went from launch in June 2009 to tens of millions of monthly players within months, and the company’s methods have been copied across the social games business.

The same company spent part of late 2009 answering criticism over the lead-generation offers in its games. Players could earn virtual currency by signing up for outside deals, and some of those deals turned out to be mobile subscriptions that were hard to cancel. The offers made money. They did not delight anyone. Zynga removed most of them after the criticism became public.

That history gives the line a precise meaning. Metrics record what users do: how long they stay, whether they come back, whether they pay. They record much less about how the experience feels, and a product can move every number in the right direction while people grow quietly tired of it. Delight is the part that makes a user recommend a product, forgive its mistakes and stay when a competitor appears. In a farming game it is often something small: a crop that ripens just as the player returns, a gift from a neighbor, a building that looks better than expected. None of those shows up as a line item, yet each is part of why people open the game again tomorrow.

There is a harder question in Zynga’s case: whose delight? Social games grow through the people who play them, sending gifts, requests and news to friends. Many of those friends never asked to hear about a lost cow. The player was delighted and the friend was annoyed, and Facebook eventually limited how apps could post and notify on users’ behalf. A product can please its own users while spending the goodwill of everyone around them.

The line also has an obvious limit. Delight does not pay salaries on its own. A product people love and nobody pays for is a hobby, and Zynga’s attention to revenue is the reason it can employ the designers who make the games better.

In practice, delight works best as a check on the metrics. When a change raises revenue, ask whether a user would describe it as a gift or a trick. Tricks show up as short-term gains and long-term decline, and the dashboards usually notice the decline last.