Kathy Sierra: Building Badass Users
I recently watched a great talk by Kathy Sierra “Building Badass Users” from the Mind The Product conference organised in London.
If you have 50 minutes to spare, watch the talk. It’s really good. If you don’t, however, this short summary might be just for you.
Enter Kathy:
As product builders we want to generate word of mouth marketing. We want users to recommend our product / service / app to their friends and/or to leave positive reviews online.
However, building a perfect product is difficult and often even impossible.
So how can we achieve the desirable word of mouth if our product isn’t perfect? Can we fix the product by providing detailed instructions in the manual or the FAQ section? Can we fix it in the marketing?
No and no.
We should “fix it in the user”.
A user doesn’t say “I love this app” because she loves the app. What she really says is: “I am amazing” as a result of something she was able to do or be thanks to the product. Therefore, we should pay special attention to the results desired by our users.
The fact that a user is using our product means that they are motivated. The problem lies when something stops them from achieving the result they were seeking to achieve; in so called derailments.
Derailment is not caused by the lack of motivation. It happens at one of two dimensions: the ability (cognitive thinking) or willpower.
They are related to each other. The less cognitive thinking the more willpower, the more willpower the less cognitive thinking. They both come from the same pool of cognitive resources.
That’s why the UX has to be easy and intuitive – to reduce the costly cognitive leaks.
How?
- By making things more intuitive
- By reducing choice with filters and defaults
- By creating habits / automating tasks
- By making it easier to focus on (no moving objects, for example)
Finally, It also matters where our users are and what they do. Many things are competing for their cognitive resources: family, work, etc. Let’s not pretend that it’s not the case and let’s not think that the problem is that they struggle. The real problem is when we act like they shouldn’t. The best way to close all potential cognitive leaks is to show that we know what it’s really like (and build things that are easy and intuitive to use).
Conclusion and my experience with bad UX
I could not agree more with Kathy Sierra – it’s crucial to understand what a user wants to achieve from our product and make it as easy for her as possible. On many occasions, I understood first hand what a bad UX feels like and how demotivating it can be.
Recently, my colleague Crispin and I set up a monthly fitness challenge for ourselves. We established what our objectives were, what kind of exercises and how often we were going to perform. Then, I was on a lookout for an app that could notify me when Crispin logs an activity and would remind me about my workout. The idea was to keep each other accountable, stay committed and hopefully reach our (quite ambitious) goals.
I found MakeMe. The app’s core functionality lets you create a personal development challenge and invite your friends to join it. Sounds pretty straight forward, right? I thought so, too. The app designers could not complicate things more, though. Setting up a challenge in the app is quite time consuming and joining it is not intuitive at all. What is more, when Crispin finally managed to join my challenge, some of the key details were not shared with him. It was not intuitive at all where to tap to view the goals or how to log a completed activity. It literally took us over 10 minutes of standing next to each other and looking at each others phones to ensure everything was sync’d. There were at least half a dozen derailment opportunities and I was tempted to delete the app before everything was set up. The only reason why we prevailed was because we were still keen to test the app’s functionality and of course complete the challenge. But most people are not like us and I bet the app’s drop off rate is quite significant. This is disappointing, because it’s a great idea and if executed properly it could have helped a lot of people.
