Monday, February 16, 2015

== book: Badass: Making Users Awesome: Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates ==

badass - Wiktionary
(US, slang) Having extreme appearance, attitude, or behavior that is considered admirable. Synonyms (admirable): cool, awesome

Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates sold more than 2 million books with no marketing budget. Now they are helping others do similar successes.

book: Badass: Making Users Awesome - O'Reilly Media
Sample chapter (60+ pages)

Badass: Making Users Awesome: Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates: 9781491919019: Amazon.com: Books
"...question: given competing products of equal pricing, promotion, and perceived quality, why does one outsell the others?
... The answers to what makes a sustainable bestseller aren’t in the successful product. The answers are in the successful product’s users."

Kathy Sierra: Building the minimum Badass User, Business of Software. A masterclass in thinking about software product development. - Business of Software US

video: Kathy Sierra: Building the minimum Badass User, Business of Software 2012 on Vimeo
video: Kathy Sierra - Building the Minimum Bad Ass User. Part Two. Unfinished Business... on Vimeo

The bar for making a product great is usually quite high ("Book awesome")
The bar for helping the user be better (by using product) is usually much lower ("User awesome")
So it is much more effective to focus on helping user be great, by using your product.
Design literacy


Kathy Sierra on Designing for Badass - Business of Software US
Our goal as product owners should be to 
take our users up the expertise curve as much as possible, as fast as possible

Definition of expertise: Given a representative task,
experts perform in a superior way, more reliably, than non experts (not novices).

Therefore, badass = reliably superior performance.


Goal of Awesome Products: Creating "Badass" Users


Deliberate Practice (learning method) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
...how expert one becomes at a skill has more to do with how one practices than with merely performing a skill a large number of times. An expert breaks down the skills that are required to be expert and focuses on improving those skill chunks during practice or day-to-day activities, often paired with immediate coaching feedback. Another important feature of deliberate practice lies in continually practicing a skill at more challenging levels with the intention of mastering it."


Creating Passionate Users: How to be an expert
Howtobeanexpert

Building the Minimum Badass User Pt 2 - Unfinished Business. Kathy Sierra - Business of Software US
"Half a skill beats a half-assed skill
In fact, half a skill beats lots and lots of half-assed skills. 
So it’s better to have just a tiny, tiny, sub skill completely nailed to very high quality."

Making Badass Developers - Kathy Sierra (Serious Pony) keynote - YouTube
Published on Apr 22, 2015
"From Fluent 2015. "Every moment of every day there’s a new language, framework, format, protocol to learn. Nobody has a more dynamic skill set than a web developer. We’ll look at the one metaskill to rule them all: The ability to come up to speed and stay there, over and over again."


Badass: Making users awesome – Kathy Sierra: Book Review at Mark Needham
2015 03 20 06 52 51


DraganSr: In The Zone: the Flow State

Flow | This Emotional Life
"flow is the point where your challenges meet your skills"


elearn Magazine: Gamification: Using Game Mechanics to Enhance eLearning
"Giving your learner choices by designing nonlinear eLearning can help engage your user.
...as the challenge of an experience rises, the skill of the participant must also grow in direct proportion. 
...If a user's skill exceeds the challenge of the experience, they will become bored.
...if the challenge exceeds the participant's skill, they will suffer anxiety.
...an optimal user experience is illustrated in the "Flow Channel" as the squiggly line.


Related books:

web: HTML5 Offline (IndexedDB)

Web could work in "disconnected" mode, as mobile apps, but it is more involved than standard "always connected" web pages / apps.

Offline.js – Handle your users losing their internet connection like a pro @ GitHub
Offline.js Simulate UI

Android Apps in Chrome Browser

How to Run Android Apps Inside Chrome on Any Desktop Operating System
ARC: The App Runtime for Chrome (or ARC) is the piece of software that allows Android apps to run in Chrome. In the same way that ART (and the older Dalvik) currently run Android apps in Android itself. By making a modified version of the Android runtime for Chrome, Google can allow developers to add support for Chrome without rebuilding their apps from the ground up.

About App Runtime for Chrome (Beta) - Chromebook Help