Katie Sierra on how to create popular applications and increase the “toughness” of its users

Original author: Kathy Sierra
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Is it possible to create a popular application today? Markets are divided, niches are busy, competition is very tight ... But this is not the time for developers to indulge in sadness! The overall bar of applications is still low, and it is still possible to beat all competitors. So says Kathy Sierra in her speech with the difficult-to-translate theme “ Building the minimum Badass User ” and its continuation .

Katie Sierra is known in Russia primarily as the author of the world-famous bestselling book Learning Java. But books on programming are far from everything she does. Learning theory, interface development, application marketing, motivation - this is an incomplete list of topics on which she regularly writes articles and speaks at conferences. These two speeches came to our attention because they summarize and summarize the most valuable of her own development experience, as well as hundreds of Katie's scientific papers. Before you is not a translation, but rather a summary of the most interesting thoughts and practical recommendations.

How to make a product desirable?


Let's ask ourselves one very simple question.

Why is a certain product or service truly desirable and in demand in the long run? What specific properties or qualities of this product make it such?

The first thing that comes to mind is the quality of execution. However, there are many beautifully made products that have failed. And while there are lots of other products, executed almost horribly, but enjoy the same popularity and demand. Users are ready to understand and forgive a poor implementation, and gross errors with a smile are called “features”.

Word of mouth today rules the ball: 92% of respondents trust the recommendations of friends and family members more than all other forms of advertising. 70% trust reviews and tips from strangers on the Internet. Both indicators grew year after year, and are likely to continue to grow. Therefore, the key to success is for your customers to tell their friends: “You really need to buy this!”

But how to achieve this? The trouble with most companies is that they are not competing there . “Great product,” “Great company,” “Great service,” in other words, they are struggling to “be the best.” But the user's goal is different. The user wants to become better himself. He wants to be cool at anything. To be badass .

Sad chart:



The main mistake is the focus on making the application better. Instead of helping better users of the application , simplify their life, give them a new useful skill, or make them pros in something. If the focus is chosen correctly, then a high rating of the application and recommendations to friends is just a side effect.

The most important attribute of a successful application is not in the application itself, but in its users . The most important part of the application is the benefits that its owners get. And this is much more important than a stylish design, clear interface, fast and polite support service, marketing and other things.

Let's look at the following diagram:



On the left, we see what happens if we focus on the product itself (application, service, etc.). We find ourselves in a difficult situation: we need to surpass dozens, if not hundreds of competitors. It takes a lot of effort. And only by making the product better than anyone, we gain access to a small free market niche.

It’s a completely different situation if we focus on the consumers of our product and think primarily about them. Unfortunately or fortunately, the bar here is still surprisingly low. Getting around competitors and gaining access to a free niche is much easier. Let the quality of the product you lose to competitors (in other words, lose in the left scale). However, your product will be more successful.

Example : Katie Sierra Head First Programming Books. Books have been on the list of the most popular and best-selling on Amazon for many years. How did you manage to achieve this? Most authors of programming books seek to demonstrate their weight, depth of thought, and significance of theses. The book makes you feel stupid and the author smart. Often there is a feeling that the authors do not care if their reader understands. As a result, many begin to read and throw: "Not my level, I have not been given." The authors of the Head First series were not afraid to do otherwise: go down to the lowest level, state everything in an accessible language and explain even obvious things in as much detail as possible.

People use apps not because they like apps. They use applications because they love ... yes, yes, an unexpected surprise - themselves.This is their true incentive. They tell friends about your application because they love you to their friends.

However, this main secret is easily forgotten. It's all about the point of view with which we look at the development process. The right point of view can suddenly replace a massive marketing budget or the need to find venture capital for your product.

What is this very “toughness” (badass) of the user, for which we must fight by all means? In short, it means acquiring a new useful skill, solving your problem, becoming a professional or an expert in something.

Before discussing this in more detail, let us specifically dwell on what is not steep :

1. Gamification.In most cases, gamification harms the user. There is one exception: when you need to force users to do something that they strongly dislike. In other cases, you treat users like experimental rats and start the same operant conditioning mechanism , on the basis of which slot machines or cocaine work.

2. Bet on the support service. A support service is only good if it helps the user become better. Everything else - speed of reaction, politeness of treatment - is secondary for the user. Unless support is the essence of your business.

Now about the very “steepness” and what is hidden behind it.

Look for more context



Nobody wants to be a pro only in your application (with some exceptions). Most often, your application has a larger user-friendly context that you need to see. What is the user actually doing with or because of you? Let's look at the following diagram:



For example, you are Sony Vegas Movie Studio, a competitor is Adobe Premiere Elements or Final Cut, and the overall context is video editing. The user does not want to be “cool” in video editing programs. He wants to create cool videos.

By the way, marketers understand this well. Let's remember how we are usually treated before and after a purchase using digital cameras as an example:



Before buying, focus on what the user will do with the camera. After the purchase - focus only on the instrument.

Exercise : Imagine a dialogue that a user of your application may have while chatting with friends. What does he boast of?

Your success depends on the results of users. Consider the following questions:

  • Have you done everything so that users achieve maximum results?
  • Do you make users more interesting for their audience (chatting with friends at dinner, likes and reposts in social networks)?

Design and UX are designed not only for the user, but also for what happens after interacting with the application (design for the post-UX UX). Not only application users should be impressed with your application, but others must be impressed with your users!

A bit of scientific theory about experts and skill


Being “cool” means being an expert in something.

Definition The expert shows consistent superior results in anything compared to other users with comparable experience. These are not one-time achievements , even if they are very, very outstanding.

Examples:
  • given a position on the chessboard - the expert stably chooses the best continuation of the game;
  • given a patient with a set of symptoms - the expert stably makes the correct diagnosis

Recent research in the theory of motivation suggests that we all by nature strive for mastery. Starting to use something that helps to grow - an application, a service, a series of books - it’s hard for us to stop. Growth is becoming a habit: we are becoming more tolerant of flaws and want more advanced versions.

One of the ways to improve is to increase "resolution" in any business. The more experienced you are, the higher your skill, the more details, subtleties and nuances you can notice in your business. This is also a reward and a source of pleasure.

Example: if you do not know anything about astronomy, then the starry sky is for you it's just a black background with randomly scattered bright points. Someone can find the Ursa Major and the polar star, someone knows dozens of constellations, someone knows the planets, someone can determine the time of year from the starry sky. Distinguishing details is the true power.

Three giant myths about mastery:

1. Mastery requires knowledge. Yes, experts know more, but just knowing does not make them experts.

2. Mastery requires experience. Experience is also not an indicator, we all know people who have been doing the same thing for years and remain at the same level. After about two years, further experience is a poor predictor of effectiveness. Nevertheless, practice matters, and we will talk about this later.

3. Mastery requires talent. Talent never arises from scratch - years of practice are behind it, but often this is deliberately hidden.

Experts are determined not by what they know, but by what they do. Many have heard about the magic number of ten thousand hours of practice, guaranteed to turn an ordinary person into an expert. The main thing here is the ten thousand hours figure, which is not amazing, but the quality of this practice. It is not a simple routine of repeating a skill. There must be three components :

1. Models to follow - examples of the reference performance of certain actions.

2. Deep practice - practice on the brink of opportunity with the obligatory correction of errors.

3. Moving Forward - A phased long-term skills development plan. This is like a table of contents in a book.

Below we will talk in more detail about these components and their practical application.

Preliminary stage : determine what skill and “steepness” are in your case. For example, list all the tasks that the user encounters in a larger, meaningful context. For each task, write what result the expert can achieve in it.

Tip : Avoid the word “best” (“the expert will choose the best option among all”) and try to determine its values ​​for your case as specifically as possible.

It would seem that everything is simple further: you need to find experts and find out from them how they do it. But here we are faced with a “curse of experts”: experts do not know what needs to be done to teach other people what they can do . They forgot how it feels to not know. Or they don’t know how to single out the essentials and say that much more needs to be learned than is actually required. Or they think this is too obvious. Or refer to intuition. Unfortunately, none of these answer options are encouraging.

But: just observing an expert and copying his actions makes the practice better(even if there are no comments and explanations, the expert simply shows something and says “it’s good”, shows something else and says “it’s bad”). Observing and repeating mediocre practices produces mediocre results.

An impressive and most extreme example: gender determination of newborn chickens.This is a task of high complexity, as newborn chickens look the same regardless of gender. The student stands behind the conveyor and silently begins to sort the newborn chickens by gender: future hens to the right, cocks to the left. He is also silently watched by an expert. Each time in the event of an error, he corrects the student, without any explanation: just “yes” or “no”. After some time, the student begins to reliably determine the sex of the chickens. However, he is not able to even partially explain why he is doing this.

Information about the expert’s skills can be represented as the following diagram:



We can express explicit knowledge in words. This knowledge can be described and told to other people. With implicit (or perceptual) knowledge, everything is more complicated: it is acquired with experience, but is not expressed or poorly expressed in words. It used to be that an incredible amount of hours of experience was needed to gain implicit knowledge.

But recent studies show that the brain is able to absorb implicit knowledge through examples. And do it very quickly if the examples are chosen correctly. The technique works not only for body skills (such as in sports), but also for difficult areas such as pilot training or mathematics.

There should be a lot of examples (maybe hundreds) for the brain to separate the signal from the noise, which is essential from the secondary one. Examples of “no need to do this” will not work. Even if we know that this is bad, the brain still unconsciously copies. Remember how often we unknowingly copied someone’s accent or pronunciation, although we didn’t want to. Examples “as it is not necessary” are useful for advanced users, but certainly not for intermediate and beginners. And once again we emphasize the danger of creating examples with mediocre practice: they are also easy to remember.

The acquisition of explicit knowledge strongly depends on how it is presented (structure, form, language) and on the characteristics of the student. But memorization of implicit knowledge is much less sensitive to the presentation of material and individual differences, since this knowledge does not pass through the part of the brain that is responsible for thinking and speech.

This fact was confirmed by studies of people with brain damage who were unable to create new memories. Any information after an injury was new to them whenever they met it. Nevertheless, if they were taken for a walk dozens of times along the same route, they could go the same way on their own. Although they could not explain why they are doing this.

Let's move on to practical recommendations. There will be three of them.

1. If you can give users only one thing, give them enough examples of how it looks really good.

These should not be examples of overwhelming complexity, where users cannot make out anything. But, as the example of chickens shows, skills can be fixed without understanding.

2. The second most important thing is deep practice (deliberate practice) . This is a practice on the verge of possibilities with the obligatory making of mistakes, their recognition and correction. Essential components of in-depth practice:
  • high-quality and fast feedback;
  • splitting complex into simple elements;
  • 90-95% reliability for 1-3 lessons.

To learn something, we must master a lot of skills. Each skill goes through three stages: “I can’t”, “I can perform an action with effort” and “I can perform an action automatically”. Let's look at the diagram below. Yellow squares are separate skills. At first glance, everything is simple: in order to learn something, you need to move all the yellow squares from zone A to zone C.



Most get stuck in the middle zone. The main problem of a mediocre level is not that some skills are not mastered, but that too many wrong actions are brought to automaticity.Too much is being done wrong, but already unconsciously and effortlessly. It pulls back and does not allow to develop. In order not to fall into this trap, experts are doing something unobvious. If some skill is fixed incorrectly in the stage of automatism or can be improved, then they return it to the previous stage, work it out again, consciously and with effort, improve it and return it to the stage of automatism again.

But there is something worse than being stuck on an average level. There is a popular opinion: in order to maintain your level, you just need to regularly use the acquired skills. For example, the fact that a pilot flies a plane or a doctor treats patients is in itself a guarantee of maintaining their professional level. In fact, this is not so: without additional training, the professional level is slowly but constantly decreasing. It’s a little scary if you think about the doctors who treat us and the pilots who fly the planes we fly. The problem is not in age-related changes, but in the need to regularly return their skills to the “doing with efforts” stage.

Consider another typical mid-level stuck situation. This is an attempt to simultaneously pump and transfer from zone B to zone C all your skills in something. This takes a huge amount of strength, but the skills remain at the same level, since for each particular skill the efforts are still not enough. Then the student believes that you need to work even harder, but this also does not give a result. The solution to the problem is focusing on small groups of skills. It is better to have a very simple, but perfectly studied and automatized skill in zone C than a very complex skill in zone B.



How to build training from scratch, given the problems above?The second step in turning the user from a beginner to an expert is to break down what you want to teach into simple skills and add a series of exercises of increasing complexity to master these skills. Let the exercises be structured so that users acquire one stable skill in 1-3 lessons of 45-90 minutes each. Stability in this case is the ability to repeat a skill with 90–95% reliability (no more than one error per 10–20 repetitions). If this fails, then the complexity of the exercises is too high and you need to make them easier.

3. Moving forward.Add a clear map of the path to improvement in this area. If the user will be regularly engaged, what tasks await him in a month, in half a year or in a year? What can he achieve during this time? It's like a GPS navigator that shows where I am right now and motivates me to move forward.

It is equally important to explain not only the goal and intermediate results, but also potential difficulties along the way. As a rule, the user knows well what he is striving for. However, faced with difficulties, the user loses faith and begins to think: “This is not for me. I can't handle it. This is too hard. ” What is a typical and incorrect solution to this problem? We add even more motivation, make the goal even more attractive. And how should this problem be solved?



First, understand the reasons. Maybe the user is disappointed because the gap is too big between what he expected and what he received? Recall the camera advertising example. Before the purchase - examples of gorgeous photos, after the purchase - boring complex black and white instructions.

Secondly, to explain that obstacles are part of the path. Difficulties are normal and temporary . Everything passes through them, and the problem is not with the specific user.

Thirdly, to make sure that the user can get the first significant result as quickly as possible. For example, in 30 minutes. There are companies that use this as a rule. The joy of own success is the most important type of motivation. This is an intrinsic motivation that makes the user move further along the path. And it is here that the dangers of gamification are manifested: it is proved that external rewards (badges, points, etc.) kill internal motivation.

Protect cognitive resources!


And another equally important aspect of learning is the reduction of cognitive leaks .

Cognitive leaks are all that consumes the user's psyche resources where this can be avoided.

There is a famous experiment. Participants are divided into two groups. The first group is asked to remember a two-digit number, the second group is a seven-digit number. After the experiment, the participants go into the hall, where there are tables with fruits and cakes. Participants from the first group more often choose fruits, from the second - cakes. Why it happens? Because the will, self-control, attention and concentration are all resources from one source (cognitive resources). These resources are limited and depleted very quickly. Participants in the second group spent more cognitive resources, so they no longer have the strength to resist temptations. They choose a less healthy, but more attractive food: cakes.

How can developers use the results of this experiment? Eliminate leaks of cognitive resources wherever possible. Then the user will have the strength to focus on the main thing: learn new things, become better and “cooler”.

Typical cognitive resource leaks:
  • when we ask the user to make a choice where, in fact, the choice is not needed, it is unprincipled, and we can make it for the user;
  • non-obvious interface when the user needs to think about how to enable / disable a particular function, change the mode, etc .;
  • complicated confusing help for the application.

Some specific examples of cognitive leaks from everyday life:

1. The location of the handles on gas stoves. In most models, to save space, they are located in a line. Because of this, explanatory diagrams are placed nearby. Even after a few years, we have to look at the diagrams to remember which handle is responsible for which burner. Possible solution:



2. Tire pressure - a shot of an on-board computer Toyota Camry:



Is it possible to understand, looking at such an interface, where is which wheel? And most importantly: how do the displayed values ​​relate to the norm? Does the driver need to do something or is everything all right?

conclusions


The reasons for the success of the application are not in the application itself, but in its users. If the application makes the user better at anything, then it is doomed to success. Three things will help the user become an expert in something:

1. Qualitative examples: “as it should.”
2. Conscious practice.
3. Understanding the sequence of steps and obstacles towards the goal.

And do not forget about the main thing: eliminate leakage of cognitive resources wherever possible.

For executives


Surely you want your employees to be experts in their work, which means that the above is applicable to the entire workflow of the company. Think about the following questions:

1. Does your company have enough examples of high-quality code, looking at which new employees could learn? Qualitative specifications? Quality response templates from support?

2. Do your employees have time to practice and improve their level? These should be separate allocated hours, not related to work on paid projects. If there is such a watch, then make sure that employees fix the wrong skills as little time as possible.

Notes


1. In detail and popularly about how experts become experts, it is written in the book “Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle.

2. For internal and external motivation, read the book "Drive" by Daniel Pink.

3. Katie Sierra's “Your app makes me fat” post talks about the experiment with memorizing numbers and cognitive resources in general. Also, the topic of cognitive leaks with a host of examples is discussed in the book "Microinteractions . "

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