Creating Passionate Users
I’ve been reading this great blog lately called Looks Good Works Well, written by Bill Scott. You should definitely check it out. This is my second post here in response to something on this blog.
In his most recent post, Scott talks about his experience with a workshop at the eTech conference called “Creating Passionate Users,” given by Kathy Sierra. This workshop, he says, is very hard to summarize. But some of the salient points he picks out have broadened my perspective of user experience.
For example, Sierra talked about the idea that “users want to kick ass” at something. They want to feel like they are continually learning and gaining expertise. This is (part of) what creates passionate users.
This reminds me of the conversation I had with Karl Fast last Saturday at the IA/UX Meetup. He was talking about how his research right now is around how the actual interactions people have with systems can affect their cognition and learning of the knowledge domain. To me, designing a user experience that ellicits passion seems like a *very* effective way of improving the stickiness of learning. When people are excited about things, they think about them and keep them fresh in their memory.
I’m not sure what actual bearing this will have on the kind of work that I typically do, but this will definitely be floating around my mind for quite a while. I imagine that it may inspire an added BANG! factor somewhere down the line for some otherwise uninspiring campaign site… We’ll see!
(I nearly forgot to mention… “Creating Passionate Users” will be a book sometime in 2006… look for it!)
3 Comments
Kathy Sierra did some old vs new marketing comparison tables that I republished here a while back.
Good stuff. Now if only we could drop the word ‘users’. If only because its specificity to the online domain conflicts with the comprehensiveness of any decent ‘experience’
That’s a great list. Certainly something I’d get behind. And regarding dropping the word “users,” I’ve noticed myself substituting the word “customer” for “user” more often than not now. Because you’re right, “user” implies a context of sitting in front of a big box with a glowing screen, when in reality the context may go beyond that entirely, e.g., cooking.
Great stuff here. Very timely for me as I’m looking more into “user experience”.