Monday, March 16th at 03:30 PM
Presenter: Kathy Sierra – CreatingPassionateUsers
You to your goal – where you want to be (business, product, company, performance in something)
There is a big F&*#%ing wall in your way!
You can’t make incremental progress to get through that wall.
Incremental vs. a Breakthrough
When the incremental things don’t work – Incremental is an arms race.
Quality or Features arms race or Marketing arms race or viral arms race.
How do you get past that wall w/out incremental steps?
Breakthrough ideas or performances – suddenly becoming a WHOLE lot better at a skill. Maybe helping your users make big breakthroughs.
WOM (word of mouth) vs. WOO (word of obvious)
What’s stopping us from kicking ass? (stuck in SLR “P” mode)
People are afraid of sucking – we need to get them to upgrade.
Anyone can compete…
–Get to know each other: Flight vs. Invisibility, what would you pick? (convince your neighbor why)
What super power would you give to your users? Picture it on the super suit (pivot-table man spreadsheets, photoshop channels guy, twitter man). Would it work as an action figure? What problem do you solve? Productivity doesn’t work (broccli)
14 Ways (just bout):
2. Superset game – you vs. competitor. take on search vs. google. Ask yourself which bigger thing are all these things a part of? There is something bigger, what is it? What cooler is my thing a part of?
3. Shortcuts to a breakthrough – 10k hours to be amazing at something. 2 ways to shrink the 10k hours: learn the patterns and shorten the duration.
4. Deliberate Practice – kicking ass in < 1000 hours if they deliberately practice. Not just doing it. After 1-2 years, experience is a poor predictor of performance/expertise (10 yrs vs. 1 yr repeated 10 times). Offer exercises, games, contests, tutorials that support deliberate practice of the right things.
5. Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard. Make it easier for users to have a breakthrough than to stay where they are. It’s not in the corner because you don’t use it, ou dn’t use it because it’s in the corner.
6. Get better gear (and offer it). Help them justify the better gear. Find, make offer gear to keep users moving forward
7. Ignore standard limitations. Be stupid sometimes and just jump in ignoring the people who tell you that you can’t
8. Total Immersion Jams. How often you get your users to do something matters. 16 hours over 2 days vs. 16 hours over 2 months. Motto: “Always be closing.” 24 hour film festival forces you in to go quickly.” Less Camp, more Jam.
9. Change your perspective – don’t make a better X make a better use of X. Make your *thing* the best it can be.
10. What movie are your users in? What is their journey? What movie do your users WANT to be in? What role do you play in your user’s lives? Your company is to your users as ______ is to Frodo.
11. Don’t ask your users. If you want incremental improvements, don’t ask – if you want a breakthrough, ignore everyone. What they say is different than what they REALLY want. You can end up passing over the happy medium and having too many features. Ask other people’s users, and not your own. Look at something else, and ask about the bigger experience.
12. Be brave – Concept car moving towards actual model. Moving from the fantastic idea to the real thing, fear works its way in and the final product changes. We’re so concerned about our users we oversimpify. Henry Ford said, “if I asked my users what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Look at things people think are dead or obsolete and see if it still has utility of some sort.
14. Change the EQ – Move the sliders, price, number of features, quality, service, performance. Add new sliders that aren’t normally part of a particular product to make breakthroughs. Dethe Elza made a slider generator. What did Gary do?
Gary Vaynerchuk in WineLibrary.tv. Talked about wine from the heart. There was a severe lack of wine self esteem.
15. Don’t mistake narrow for shallow – lolcats+translation = 52,000 google hits.
16. Be amazed!
Who is awesome? You are awesome!
More notes from this panel available here:
Blogs.utexes
Fastwonderblog.com