Business Insight Zone

Kathy Sierra has become a perennial hit at South by Southwest Interactive. She’s one of the prime movers behind O’Reilly’s Head First series of software books, and she’s won a large following with her smart application of neuroscience and psychology to the challenges of making software more user-friendly.

Although she suspending blogging at Creating Passionate Users last year, her archives are still available to inspire those looking for better solutions to usability problems. While I don’t write software, I love thinking about how Sierra’s insights apply to broader issues of teaching/training and to much broader issues of general management. Smart companies are increasingly turning to the insights of neuroscience to tease out better ways of doing things.

Some of what Sierra said in this year’s speech was old hat for her long-time followers, but who cares? Her talk was so popular that it filled Ballroom A at the Austin Convention Center, and then filled overflow rooms as well.

I won’t recap the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

• The goal of your products shouldn’t be to have users crowing about your company, or even about your products, but rather crowing about how they — the users — now “kick ass” by using our products. You want them saying “I kick ass!” (This is one of Sierra’s favorite lines, and always draws a laugh.)
• To do this, we need to make software applications that compensate for the missing “human-ness” in human-computer interactions.
• Why do people want to grow and get better? Because getting better at something allows them to get a higher-resolution experience, i.e. a deeper and richer user experience. (E.g. if you know more about music, you hear more when you listen to a given piece of music.)
• When we compare world-class practitioners of various skills to experienced but non-world-class practitioners, what are the common attributes? “It’s not about natural talent!,” Sierra says. Instead, it’s about a talent for practicing — about having the motivation to put in the time.*
• “Use telepathy” with your users — by firing the mirror neurons (a.k.a. “telepathy neurons”) in their brains. Help them, in other words, to visualize and mentally simulate what you want them to do, rather than trying to get them to think their way through it by logic.
• Serendipity: since brains love serendipity, we should give users the chance to make serendipitous choices in our products, by leaving in just a little bit of randomness for them to explore.
• Create joy. The crowd laughed when Sierra said, “I know that a lot of you are making products that don’t produce a lot of joy.” But to the brain, this isn’t funny business — brains wrap themselves easily around the joy of playing.
• Give your users tools for evangelism. Give them a way to woo other users; people love it when they can get others to understand what they’re doing, or even to mimic it for themselves. Enable this deep-seated desire.
• Give your users “superpowers,” quickly. Sierra cites the mantra of a software company whose target is “The user must do something cool within 30 minutes.” Think about how to keep users pushing forward — up the learning curve — by enabling them to do more and cooler things.
• Allow people the chance to focus. If you make something that hurts people’s attention, acknowledge the costs of that, and then do something that helps them to give their full attention elsewhere.
• Create a culture of support. Ideally, you help foster a user’s community that encourages people to ask and answer questions, and that teaches them to ask and answer good questions.

Near the end of her talk, Sierra brought up Gary Vaynerchuk, the Internet mini-celebrity behind the video blog WineLibrary. Sierra said that Vaynerchuk is doing all the things she talked about by helping wine drinkers have a higher-resolution wine experience. He shares his expertise to enable these rich experiences, but without the cultural baggage that traditionally goes along with wine. In other words, he uses empathy, mirror neurons, and all the rest of it to help his users kick ass, e.g. when they’re hosting their own dinner parties.

Over a huge round of closing applause, Sierra exhorted her audience to “Go help your users kick some ass!”

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* This reminds me of a great quote from a New Yorker profile on Ivan Lendl, possibly the least elegant but most rigorous of all tennis champions:

“People will sometimes ask me,’How much talent did you have in tennis?’ I say, ‘Well, how do you measure talent?’ Yeah, sure, McEnroe had more feel for the ball. But I knew how to work, and I worked harder than he did. Is that a talent in itself? I think it is.”

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(Photo, once again, by the sweet-shooting deneyterrio.)