In any product building story, we always land up talking about
“Let’s give the user instant gratification.”
It seems right. You users are there in your product to “win” something by getting something done quicker, better or cheaper and the earlier you get them there the better. Hence, gratifying them instantly, really is the right approach.
But why though? What is it with “Instant Gratification”? Why is it so important?
If you look at nature and the world around you, nothing really does that.
It takes years to get in shapeIt takes years to master an art or a subjectIt takes years for things around us to growIt takes years for products, and services to mature into really good systemsHell, even bitcoins took some time to reach a “bubble” stage.
It feels like everything and everyone is really stacked against us achieving anything quickly.
And this is exactly why we resort to tools to do this for us.
A good tool is something that allows us to accelerate the time taken to achieve our goals.
That’s why we build products. We help users add minutes, hours and days off a user’s life by helping them outsource that time to our product. That’s it. Instant gratification is an indicator that our product is, in fact living up to that expectation. If the product is adding more time to a user’s work life, then it’s really of no use.
And that’s the doubt that “instant gratification” tries to get nullified quickly.
