creating passionate users

Kathy Sierra’s keynote, Creating Passionate Users, was really great yesterday. She’s an extremely talented speaker and has an intimate understanding of what it takes to get people interested and listening. More technology presentations should be so exciting. In addition, more technical tutorial books should be like Sierra’s Head First series.

The route to creating passionate users (users that “kick ass”, as she says) begins with creating a compelling story of why learning how to do something is worth it. She talked about how new snowboarders beat themselves up the first few times on a freezing cold mountain because they have a vision of doing awesome things on a snowboard and impressing their friends later on. The promise of a future “I Rule” experience is the motivation.

Most importantly, Sierra emphasized that documentation is critical. She advocated that cash-strapped start-ups should throw away their marketing budget and invest the money instead in developing good documentation. Most technical documentation is so incredibly awful because it is written as if users want to know how a tool works, and it is written for digestion by expert users. As she pointed out, users don’t care how the tool works. Just tell them how to get stuff done. Context-specific WTF? documentation is what users need, but it’s rarely available.