PragmaticPixels.com

Kathy Sierra - CreatingPassionateUsers

Incremental vs. Breakthrough

• incremental == arms race; quality, features,
• getting through the wall: breakthroughs
• word of mouth vs. word of obvious
• change the way you help people make a breakthrough with your product, don’t just change your product
• ask: what superpowers would you give your users? how would that change how you do things?
• increasing productivity = broccoli

things

• 2.) Superset game ( (you)  (competitor)             bigger/cooler thing        )
• 3.) Shortcuts - 10k hours to be a master; learn the patterns, shorten the duration
• 4.) Kicking ass in < 1k hours with deliberate practice; after 1-2 years experience is a poor predictor of performance expertise; offer things that build on users strengths
• 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
• 6.) Get better gear (and offer it) - have to help them justify though. Find, make, offer high-end “gear” that bumps them to a new level
• Reading: The Cluetrain Manifesto
• 7.) Be dumb?
• 8.) Total immersion jams: 16 hours in 2 days or 16 hours over 2 weeks
• Check out: Ad Lib Game Developer Society
• 9.) Change your perspective - don’t make a better X, make a better user of X
• 10.) What movie are your users in? What movie do they want to be in? (and don’t forget the soundtrack) Who are your users allies and mentors? Your tech support, Aragorn or Jabba? Your company is to your user as _____ is to Frodo.
• Check out: Roomware
• 11.) Want breakthroughs? Don’t ask your users. Users = incremental improvements (which are bad). Graph: The Featuritis Curve. Ask other peoples users.
• Read: Hugh McCloud, Ignore Everybody
• 12.) Be brave - Death by risk aversion: Fantastic idea -> fear happens -> crap output
• 13.) Rethink deadness - Henry Ford: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said faster horses.” Etsy, Make Magazine
• 14.) Change the EQ - don’t just change things (move the sliders), add new things (new sliders)
• 15.) Don’t mistake narrow for shallow
• Check out: http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/, Literally, a Web Log, The blog of uncessary quotation marks,
• 16.) Be amazed

Scott Belsky - Behance
web: http://www.behance.com
email: scott@behance.com

• Attraction breeds loyalty - if it works people will keep using it instead of reinventing all the time
• Prioritize projects visually - project leaderboards
• Seek cross-pollination: look for ideas/people dissimilar to your groups
• Share ideas liberally: find validation or momentum for ideas/projects;
• Fight your way to breakthroughs
• Don’t become burdened by consensus: Everyone wants to have their piece and to have consensus and you end up with the lowest common denominator; find a few things from each project to protect, concede on the less important things
• Get respect (overcome the stigma of self-marketing)

Leadership

• Leaders talk last (silence the visionary): best thing leaders can do is nothing, let other ideas get out before presenting their own
• Reduce your amount of “insecurity work” (METRICS): don’t freak if you’re not hitting conversion goals, if Google Analytics server is down, etc
• Value the teams immune system: don’t harsh on the “debbie downers”, let bad ideas get killed; these people can help eliminate waste and cruft
• Seeking restraints: (gee, no worry for us)
• Stop focusing on the visionaries: don’t focus on award winning, don’t get drunk on your Kool-aid, quit building things for yourself
• Judge based on initiative, not experience
• Value chemistry over people: having all the smartest people in the room doesn’t mean squat if there’s no chemistry
• Unique is opportune: don’t shun unique until it’s successful: nothing extraordinary is achieved through ordinary means