Yeah! Shook hands with Kathy Sierra! (SXSW day 4) 1

My heroine in professional blogging has long been Kathy Sierra. Creating Passionate Users was always an inspiring read.

I love the style of her illustrations, which is why I’ve included several in this post. It was a real shame what happened to Kathy Sierra, depriving us of further posts on this blog.

To my delight, Kathy Sierra was in the programme here at SXSW, and that was one talk I wasn’t going to miss.

Sierra talked about the differences between bringing about incremental changes as opposed to making a breakthrough when incremental changes is not giving the desired efffect.

Sierra stated that users need breakthroughs when using a website or an application over time. Her illustrations and arguments for why breakthroughs may be necessary can help you if you need to argue for a significant upgrade, or new implementation. One of her blog articles delves into this in more detail.

A breakthrough can be that they manage to do their job significantly better or achieve something entirely new.

In order to give users the opportunity for breakthroughs, Sierra says to pose the question:

What superpower would you give your users?

What should the text on the superhero suit say? As examples, for Excel users pivot-tables represented a major breakthrough and in Photoshop, channels gave users superpowers. Try this approach for your own website or application, and you can only choose a single superpower.

In the conference, Sierra asked the audience to choose between flight (as in being able to fly) and invisibility. And then argue why we had made that choice to the person next to us. Both Synve and myself chose invisibility, and what it says about our personality I don’t know, but we both used the argument that with invisibility we could sneak around and listen to people without them knowing :-)

Sierra says that many breakthroughs never happen because of a lack of willingness to take risks.

Some applications or websites die because of this, they’ve developed their users as far as they can go with incremental improvements, and need a breakthrough in order that users will still stay interested and satisfied.

Sierra used an audio equalizer as a metaphor for the difference between the incremental and breakthrough approach.

In an incremental approach, you twiddle the sliders, a bit more of this a bit less of that. However, in a breakthrough approach, you make up different names on the sliders, or add sliders.

Sierra pointed to a mini Sierra slider-tool that (I think) a student made, where you can interactively change (or twiddle) the sliders.

Sierra is a much sought after speaker at conferences, but have cut down this activity since the incidents described in the Wikipedia article. However, we thought we’d give it a shot to get in touch with Sierra, if not for our conference this year, then perhaps for some other time.

So we queued up in front of the stage, along with the other starstruck groupies, and did in fact get to the front of the line. And yeah! I shook hands with my heroine Kathy Sierra! And she asked for our business cards!

We stated were we came from, gave her a poster of the Bad Usability Calendar (which she loved!) and asked whether it would be OK to contact her for a possible future speaking engagement in Norway.

Sierra keeps Icelandic horses, so we tempted her with a flight via Reykjavik if it ever comes off, which seemed to remove some of her initial hesitation :-)

It was a good day at the SXSW interactive festival!

The Cowgirls 4 Ever Score (6 cows is best score)

Technical content:

Presentation:

Other presentations we attended

• Browser Wars III: The Platform Wins. Arun Ranganathan (Mozilla), Chris Wilson (Microsoft), Brendan Eich (Mozilla Foundation), Charles McCathieNevile (Opera Software), Darin Fisher (Google). Where was the fight? Wanted to see some blood! At least a light sabre or two … This was more like a tea party.
• Bruce Sterling Session. Bruce Sterling (Wired.com). Interesting talk (not a slide in sight!) by sci-fi author and Wired journalist Bruce Sterling, summing up the state of the industry (and the world too). It got a bit depressive, and some of it was very specifically directed towards Americans. However, it was still entertaining and thoughtprovoking.