Jared S. Bauer, PhD's personal site 2026-03-01T00:00:00Z https://jaredbauer.me/ Jared S. Bauer, PhD 2026-03-01T00:00:00Z https://jaredbauer.me/blog/2026-03-01-measuring-product-delight/ <p>Nesrine Changuel interviewed me for her newsletter on product delight — a topic I've thought a lot about, particularly in the context of developer tools, which have historically been... not known for delighting their users.</p> <p>The conversation covers how I think about the difference between surface delight and deep delight. A lot of products reach for confetti animations and celebratory moments — and those have their place. But at GitHub, we talked about going &quot;beyond confetti&quot;: building delight into the functional foundation of the product, not as a layer on top of it. Delight that doesn't rest on a base of accessibility, utility, and solid usability isn't really delight — it's decoration.</p> <p>We also talked about &quot;slices&quot; as a product development philosophy: delivering complete, vertical experiences even when they're small, rather than shipping polished components that don't hang together into something a user can actually use. It's a way of ensuring that every increment of the product has real value, not just technical completeness.</p> <p>The interview also touches on my academic background in distributed cognition and context-aware systems, and how that shapes the way I think about users — always situated in a context, always embedded in workflows that extend well beyond the product itself.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://nesrinechanguel.substack.com/p/chat-with-jared-bauer-customer-researcher">Read on Substack →</a></strong></p> 2021-12-01T00:00:00Z https://jaredbauer.me/blog/2021-12-01-what-to-measure-during-a-beta/ <p>How do you know if a product in beta is ready to launch? How do you turn a flood of user feedback into a strategy? These are the questions I sat with during the GitHub Projects beta — and the experience led me to develop a measurement framework I've used ever since.</p> <p>The framework is called <strong>DUUF</strong>: Delight, Usability, Utility, and Fit. It draws on two well-validated models — the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which established that perceived usefulness and ease of use predict adoption, and Product Market Fit, which captures whether a product satisfies a need that no alternative adequately addresses. To those I added Delight, which hedonic systems research shows is a meaningful independent predictor of whether people continue using a product.</p> <p>What makes DUUF useful in practice is that the four measures aren't aggregated into a single score. They're kept separate because they address different aspects of the user experience — and because their relative importance shifts over time. During a beta, Delight, Fit, and Utility matter more than Usability: users are willing to tolerate rough edges if the core value is there. As a product matures, Usability becomes more important.</p> <p>The piece walks through how we applied DUUF during the GitHub Projects beta — in surveys, interviews, and focus groups — with examples of the feedback each dimension surfaces and how to act on it.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://medium.com/@jaredsb/what-to-measure-and-how-to-measure-it-during-a-beta-e9a1283dc54d">Read on Medium →</a></strong></p>