Change Your World in 50 Minutes: Making Breakthroughs Happen
Monday, March 16th at 03:30 PM
PRESENTERS
* Kathy Sierra – CreatingPassionateUsers
DESCRIPTION
Gain real-world ideas for markedly improved productivity from an industry expert and passionate speaker who always inspires SXSW audiences.
MONIQUE’S NOTES
There’s you. There’s your goal.
Between in the brick wall.
Incremental vs. Breakthrough
Today is about when incremental stuff doesn’t work. You need to do something drastic.
Incremental = Arms Race
Sometimes you’re in a quality arms race, or a features arms race.
Google pages are an example of the marketing, whuffie, etc. race.
So how do you get past that wall?
Breakthroughs:
ideas
performance
Your users need breakthroughs. In order for you to breakthrough, you might have to find ways to let your users make breakthroughs.
[how to be an expert graph]
WOM vs. WOO
Word of Mouth vs. Word of Obvious
You could sit at home, quietly kicking ass. But someone kicking ass is better than someone who says they are.
Are your users tuck in “P” mode? i.e., how many people have SLRs, and how many people are stuck in program mode, they don’t know how to do it.
Sometimes you’re stuck in program mode not because you don’t know how to get out of that mode but because they don’t know why they want to.
Sometimes you’re stuck in program mode because you don’t want to upgrade. You don’t want to suck again.
Anyone can compete
Sometimes you don’t have to change the product, you have to help people kick ass better than your competitors.
But we have to get to know each other first.
1) iPod Playlist and … [your real playlist!]
2) Pick one of these Flight vs. Invisibility
If the person next to you also has this superpower, you need to find someone with the other. Sell them on the superior superpower.
What superpower do we give our users?
What are we giving them as a superpower? What do you provide for them as a superpower? And how does this change what you do?
Picture it on the suit. What would you put there?
Pivot-table Man
Auto-correct Spelling Man: This is not a superpower.
Think about super-hero action figures. Would it work?
My First Scoble.
Twitter Man?
Doesn’t look like a superpower. But it is.
Motivating … because it’s good for you … Productivity Man? Lamest thing to say.
VCs say “what problem do you solve” and we think about increasing productivity. People want something better than that. Productivity is the broccoli.
What superpower do I give? What do I put on the suit?
2. Superset Game
If it’s you (little dot) vs. competitor (bigger dot), then think about the bigger thing that is inclusive of both. Taking on the bigger thing is more motivating. What cooler thing is my thing a part of?
i.e., I sell kitchen appliances. The cool thing is people are cooking, not this utensil is cool. If you blog about your company, that’s likely not the coolest thing you could be writing about. Users want to hear about cooking.
10,000 hours
Intimidating? It really takes 10,000 hours to be amazingly good. It takes years. That’s not acceptable if you’re in your 50s. LOL. How do you shrink that? How do you see the patterns and take short cuts?
1. Learn the patterns
2. Shorten the duration
Reduce to 1,000.
[Chess grandmaster can recall one graph vs. the other because one is from a real game. This is pattern knowledge. How can you capture it?]
4. Deliberate Practice
Kicking ass in
< 1,000 hours can happen if you do deliberate hours of practice.
After 1-2 years, experience is a poor predictor of performance/expertise. (10 years vs. 1 year repeated 10 times)
What do experts do?
Tiger Woods pop quiz: how much practice time on weaknesses vs. strengths?
He works on his strengths.
Help your users deliberately practice. Offer exercises, games, contests, tutorials that support deliberate practice of the Right Things.
How do you construct this? Where there's an education field, you can find the answer.
Where is the sell-by-date of “solutions”? The first pages that come up can be soooo last month. These things might not work anymore. When you organize bits of knowledge, guess at the sell-by-date. Or at least make someone be responsible for smelling the milk.
5. Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard
Think about this.
Make it easier for users to have a breakthrough than to stay where they are.
Treadmill gathering cobwebs? It’s not in the corner because you don’t use it, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner.
If the exercise bike is in the corner, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner. Put it in the middle of the room. Remove the comfy seats and leave the bike.
6. Get better gear (and offer it)
Sometimes spending the extra money is required to make it good. It works better in a profound way. WOO.
“The tablet changes lives.” Drawing with a mouse is like drawing with a bar of soap.
Find, make, offer higher-end gear that bumps them to a new level.
7. Ignore standard limitations
The Cluetrain Manifesto and the Clueless Manifesto.
Don’t be limited by limitations. Learn. What would it be like if I didn’t know what it’s supposed to be?
8. Total Immersion Jams
16 hours over 2 days vs. 16 hours over 2 months
Concentration, processing, down time. Ad Lib Game Development Society is a group of people (game developers) who program games over a weekend.
Always
Be
Closing
You had to come out with 3 songs. The goal is not to be good. The goal is to get something done. You have to ship.
The Shoot Out: 24 Hours Film Making Festival
Right before the shoot, you have to pick 5 things from a list and 1 thing has to be within the first 30 seconds.
“The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume you know exactly how to do it.”
Less *Camp, More *Jam
Sometimes if we want a breakthrough, we have to go do stuff. Look at the Jam model and it’s development. Get people together to build something.
Change Your Perspective
Don’t make a better [x], make a better [user of x]
What will make them better? What changes affect that ecosystem positively?
Really think about whatever your product or service is.
What movie are your users in?
The user’s journey: call to action, refusal, enter special world, allies and mentors, enemies and bad things, more bad things, the hero’s reward.
Who are the mentors?
Is tech support Yoda or
Your company is to your user as ___ is to Frodo.
Think about what movie are your users in?
What movie do they want to be in?
(and don’t forget the soundtrack)
If you can figure out what the movie is, then you have the narrative of your journey.
Indiana Jones model?
ThemeSong AIR App. Every time you walk into a room, it plays your theme song.
Want incremental improvements? Ask your users.
If you want to make breakthroughs? Ignore everybody.
Hugh MacLeod’s next book “Ignore Everybody.”
Listening to users: what they say vs. what they REALLY want
Individuals vs. consensus
The Featuritis Curve: You can pass over the peak without noticing in an attempt to satisfy everyone.
You can ask other people’s users. At some meta level, this thing looks like that thing.
12. Be Brave
Concept car. Actual model. What happened to the fantastic idea? Fear takes us to the actual. Someone’s risk aversion is what leads to the actual model.
Another way we screw up is that we are too afraid. The ease-of-use police step in and give us easy to use, i.e., squeaky toys instead of the German Shepard. Hey, sometimes things are hard to use.
Ford: if I asked my users, they would have wanted faster horses vs. cars.
The assumption of that is it’s lame to have faster horses. But hey, look at the dead pool. The recreation horse industry in the US is worth $40 Billion annually.
Etsy.com the theory here is that these crafts are obsolete. Make magazine becomes one of the best things O’Reilly is publishing.
Can obsolete be refashioned in a new way?
14. Change the EQ
Price, Number of Features, Quality, Service, Performance.
See each as a slider. Here’s how products compete. This is the incremental competitor game.
Don’t just do the mixer. Add new sliders that normally aren’t considered. Meta-cognitive, Pain, Engaging
[In Vancouver, the art gallery, salsa dance room, cafe. Experience beyond the standard.]
i.e., picking a dentist. If you have dental fear, look for “cosmetic dentistry”. Because you don’t have to go there, they actually make the office look nice. Like a spa vs. an institution. Learn from this.
What did Gary do?
Episode418.mov
Gary Vaynerchuk, what new sliders were added here?
Action figures
Personality
Fun
Break the model
Look at people who’ve had a breakthrough. What’s on those sliders that no body had? What are the new labels to add?
15. Don’t mistake narrow for shallow
LOLCats + translation, 52,000 google pages
LOLCats translates the Bible. People take things that are ridiculously narrow and it’s not shallow.
PassiveAggressiveNotes.com is a favourite.
Literally, A Web Log
All these people looking for misused quotations.
Think of the sites you killing yourself laughing over. Think about what matters. Those things matter.
16. Be Amazed
Conan amazing video.
