Wide Area News
No bull
by Russell Brown
Learning theory guru Kathy Sierra puts the “p” back into passion.
The title of the recent Webstock internet conference in Wellington evoked the memory of an iconic music festival – but the name wasn’t the only element of the conference with the flavour of a rock concert.
The “act” at the top of the bill, learning theory guru Kathy Sierra, was a little like a supergroup closing out a big gig – all sound, light and pyrotechnics. No, she didn’t actually have things exploding, but there was a sense of the spectacular in her pacy, engaging presentation on “Creating Passionate Users”.
All conference circuit regulars drive their speeches with visual presentations: the obligatory PowerPoint presentation. So did Sierra (although she used Apple Computer’s PowerPoint competitor, Keynote), but rather than rolling out a canned presentation, she used slides that could only have been created an hour or two before she took the stage.
Like a one-woman plenary, she bridged her themes with instant “pop quiz” segments on what other speakers had said and done over the conference’s previous two days. She used an intriguing facial analysis website called My Heritage to speculate on which stars might play her fellow speakers in the movie of their lives (I am, apparently, most likely to be depicted by those masters of stubble Russell Crowe and Matthew Fox). And she generally kept 350 people engaged and amused for an hour and a half at the end of a long day.
Sierra was deploying the same psychology that was the topic of her speech. Her original background is in computer-game development, where success lies in weaving the learning experience into the playing experience, so that “the user as hero” finds it easy to begin and fulfilling to continue.
This, I am informed by my 11-year-old son, is precisely what makes Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft the most popular online game in history. And it’s precisely the problem with far too many computer software products, which are so poorly conceived that using them is not about getting the job done but about coping with the product itself.
“Take digital cameras,” Sierra advised. “If I use one of those, I’m not trying to get better at digital cameras, I’m trying to get better at photography.”
And, by the same token, if you’re using a word processor or a spreadsheet program, you’re trying to get better at writing or bookkeeping, not – as the developers of such software sometimes seem to believe – better at using software.
This principle has been deployed outside the computer industry, in marketing campaigns like the one for Red Bull energy drink. No one really wants to get better at Red Bull, or even know what’s in it. So the drink’s manufacturers, said Sierra, “picked something that people do want to get better at” to brand their product. That something being music DJing. The Red Bull DJ Academy spends millions bringing together young hopefuls from all over the world to help them hone their craft. And a sugary caffeinated drink becomes synonymous with a heroic journey.
Sierra dispensed a string of catchphrases that might have been mere psychobabble – “giving your users an ‘I rule’ experience … a higher-resolution experience … reducing guilt is the killer app” – were they not already underpinning some successful product and teaching strategies. Her speech was both fascinating and a little unnerving. Who would have thought that life was not just a game but a video game?
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The Webstock conference itself was a remarkable achievement, given that the group behind it, Web Standards New Zealand, was formed less than a year ago to stage the conference and attract a classy lineup of international speakers. The web standards movement is a /global lobby that aims to bring some order and efficiency to the web by agreeing on well-defined ways of describing and displaying web content. The idea is that standards-compliant sites won't behave differently (or not work at all) depending on which device or web browser we use to view them. In New Zealand, a key driver in the movement is work done for public sector organisations, for whom a standards-based approach means more than just doing things nicely, but making public content universally accessible. The Radio New Zealand website is a good example of the practice. For most of us, it looks like a nice, contemporary website – but that contemporary presentation is actually an overlay (technically speaking, a "style sheet") on a bare-bones structure that can be interpreted, for example, by screen-reader software for blind users. Is it a better way of doing things? Yes. And I'm sure I'm not the only conference delegate already looking forward to another round of standards evangelising at next year's Webstock.
