Users shouldn’t think about YOU

Do you care what your users think of you?

STOP IT.

Our best advice for creating passionate users is:

Care ONLY about what your users think of themselves as a result of interacting with your creation.

That’s a major shift for a lot of people, especially our tech book authors (and instructors). It’s so natural to write with a critic sitting on your shoulder representing the person who isn’t even in your target audience anyway, slamming you for leaving something out, or not being technical enough, or not proving how smart you are. I have a little story about this…

One of my jobs at Sun was to help raise the customer ratings of the Java instructors–to help instructors find more strategies for making every student/customer happier with the classes. A big mystery was why some of the most technically proficient instructors, who really knew their stuff and were good at delivering it, were getting average scores in after-class surveys. Meanwhile, the technically stronger instructors were pissed off that some of the less-competent instructors were getting fantastic scores.

The typical response was, “The instructors getting the good scores are just better entertainers. The post-class scores aren’t a good reflection of what’s REALLY important–delivering technically correct and advanced material.” They’d complain that there was no line item on the survey that measured the things that mattered like, “Does the instructor know the material?”< %

excerpt from: headrush.typepad.com…