NMC 2009 Keynote "Creating Passionate Learners" by Kathy Sierra

Everyone wants to be good at something, but often times, they never get out of the "I am no good at this" phase to reach a deeper level of understanding where their knowledge will allow them to do great things. Do people say, "This company kicks ass", or do they say, "This product kicks ass?" What we really want them to say if we design their learning experience right is "I kick ass," which means that we have empowered them to learn so well that they feel they can accomplish anything. This is what is meant by creating passionate users. Kathy showed a Nikon camera brochure. It was a slick 3-color glossy brochure that really sold the product with its flowery conversational voice. She said, "This is how they treat you before the sale..." Then she went on to show an ugly monochromatic user guide for the same camera on cheap paper that spoke to the user in formal technical terms. "And this is how they treat you after the sale." Point well taken. If the same care was taken for the manual as they took for the brochure, wouldn't it create real power-users of this camera? The people who used it would think what great photographers they were after learning to use the camera well and being able to take great photos. So it's really about the pictures, not the camera that elicits the response from the user, and in the end creates dedicated customers. She went on to say that we need to learn to look at what the brain pays attention to (Kathy has been interested in the brain and artificial intelligence since her days as a game developer). What does the brain pay attention to? It pays attention to chemistry, the very thing that it feels. But what creates that chemistry? Emotion-invoking things create chemistry. Things that are scary, things that are different, things that make you wonder, cute things like a puppy or a baby, in short anything that elicits an emotional response. We need to somehow tap into that emotion to create passionate learners. The human brain is very good at filtering things it must pay attention to. It lets very few things into its inner core that will involve one's whole attention. We need to talk to the brain, not just the learner's mind. If we can elicit an emotional response, we can get past the brain's filtering mechanism and engage the learner in a deeper way. She outlined 10 tricks to do so. I hope I've gotten them all right, they weren't all numbered in her slides:

1. Focus on what the user does, not what you do. Don't ask "How do we build a better camera?" Instead ask "How do we build a better photographer?"

2. Electric Rain, makers of Swift-3D s/w has a motto that says "Every user must be able to do something cool within 30 minutes of learning the software."

3. What makes the user smarter?

4. Don't focus on X, but focus instead on what X is a subset of. Don't blog about your kitchen appliance, but instead blog about cooking.

5. Shrink the 10,000 hours it takes to make someone a master. You do this by learning the patterns. She spoke of a man named Bruce Wilcox, who mastered a game called "Go"  in record time by writing s/w for it, which made him identify the patterns of the game.

6. Make your product or documents reflect the their feelings. If you want them to RTFM (Read the F***ing Manual) then you should try to make a better F***ing Manual. 

7. Create a culture of support. Talked of the javaranch.com user site for java programmers. The terms of service were simply "Be nice". There are no dumb questions and no dumb answers. People will sooner become participants instead of lurkers if they see the water is safe. 

8. Do NOT insist on insensitivity. Passionate users "talk different". Remember that success = more users kicking ass.

9. Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard. You don't use the treadmill in the corner of your room, because of the very fact that it is in the corner of your room. Move it to the middle and you will use it.

10. Total immersion jams (this seems to go back to #5 above). You will be more successful at learning something when it's crammed into 16 hours over 2 days rather than 16 hours over 2 months. 

11. Be brave (an extra tip thrown in)

Kathy was a very compelling speaker. She would be a great guest speaker at our symposium some year. Everyone fully enjoyed her presentation.