Kathy Sierra

Author, Co-founder, O'Reilly Media Head First Series

Cognitive Seduction
43 minutes, 20mb, recorded 2006-07-25
Kathy Sierra

If you want your users to be passionate about your product, software, course, etc. then you need to know how to talk to your users' brains. Kathy Sierra has studied cognitive seduction - getting the attention of users' brains in order to create passionate users - and successfully applied it with O'Reilly's Head First book series. Giving specific examples in various domains, she describes what passionate users have in common, such as having high resolution experiences, after getting past the "suck threshold" and arriving at the satisfaction of the "flow" experience.

Aimed particularly at the mostly developer audience, Kathy offers insights on writing documentation that doesn't just detail what all the buttons do, but rather empowers users with the understanding they need to actually do something inspiring with your product. According to Sierra, the key is getting the balance right between offering challenges and providing knowledge and skills to meet the challenges.

In her own engaging style, Sierra explains what the brain cares about, as well as what kinds of things will not turn the brain on. We hear about how to talk to users' brains by painting a picture of what users really want to do, and offering successive levels of satisfaction to bring them to the "koolaid point": passion about your product. The audience is obviously taken with Kathy's rich visuals, though listening without them is also worthwhile. (Listeners can visit her blog, Creating Passionate Users, for a good sampling of visuals.)


Kathy Sierra is the author of Creating Passionate Users, and has been interested in the brain and artificial intelligence since her days as a game developer (Virgin, Amblin', MGM). She is the co-creator of the bestselling brain-friendly Head First series (winner of the Jolt Software Development award in 2004). She is also the founder of one of the largest programmer community web sites, javaranch.com. Much of the theory and practice behind "passionate users" began when she developed and taught the first Interaction Design and New Media courses at UCLA Extension's Entertainment Studies Department, and at the IBM New Media Center at Universal Studios Citywalk.

A former master trainer for Sun Microsystems, she has spent the last few years helping others learn to apply brain-friendly techniques to inspire and maintain passionate users.

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