I attended a workshop today at the GOVIS conference in Wellington. The workshop was Kathy Sierra’s presentation ‘Creating passionate users’, and it was delivered by her colleague Tara Hunt.

In Kathy’s memorable phrasing, we were challenged to find ways to help our users ‘kick ass’. Our websites should be faithful ’sidekicks’ to our users, helping our users be better at doing their job, at their leisure activities, at paying their taxes - whatever the service is that we’re offering.

Websites - especially those that deliver any kind of service or community feature or that require users to contribute - have a learning curve. It’s important to keep the ’suck threshold’ low (the period when your user is struggling to master your service), and let users advance to the ‘kick ass’ level as soon as possible (the point at which they see the benefits and payback).

Tara’s advice is to find the hook that encourages users to make the effort to get to know you. For example, Flickr provides a free but limited service that gets you a Flickr page in minutes. It’s a low threshold for the new user (although the new requirement of having a yahoo account first is an unnecessary irritation!). Once on board, the user has a clear pathway to becoming an expert Flickr member - additional Flickr services and photo storage can be added to a user’s account for a charge.

In summary, get your user’s eyeballs onto that key service, and then let them unlock new features as they explore your site - whether that’s further content, subscriptions to newsletters and data feeds, preference options, ways to contribute their own content, etc.

It’s food for thought, and I think NZLive.com does this well for our users. The cultural events guide - our main vehicle for promoting cultural activities and services - is the website’s landing page, with options revealed along the way for customising events searches, adding information to personal calendars, emailing friends, locating cultural organisations and finding cultural funding.

The workshop has renewed my focus on ensuring that everything we add to this site helps New Zealanders and travellers ‘kick ass’ (if you’ll forgive the language) at being culturally active!

Check out the GOVS conference here and Kathy Sierra’s blog here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Social media, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.