Badass ─ Making Users Awesome

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Imagine you’re in a game with one objective: a bestselling product or service. The rules? No marketing budget, no PR stunts, and it must besustainably successful. No short-term fads.

This is not a game of chance. It is a game of skill and strategy.

And it begins with a single question: given competing products of equal pricing, promotion, and perceived quality, whydoes one outsell the others?

The answer doesn’t live in the sustainably successful products or services. The answer lives in those who use them.

Our goal is to craft a strategy for creating successful users. And that strategy is full of surprising, counter-intuitive, and astonishingly simple techniques that don’tdepend on a massive marketing or development budget. Techniques typically overlooked by even the most well-funded, well-staffed product teams.

Every role is a key player in this game. Product development, engineering, marketing, user experience, support—everyone on the team. Even if that team is a start-up of one. Armed with a surprisingly overlooked science and a unique POV, we can can reduce the role of luck. We can build sustainably successful products and services that rely not on unethical persuasive marketing tricks but on helping our users have deeper, richer experiences. Not just in the momentswhile they’re using our product but, more importantly, in the moments when theyaren’t.

Kathy Sierra created the award-winning Head First series that has sold over 1 million copies, and includes the longest-running tech bestsellers of the past decade. Her background is in developing education games and software for the motion picture industry, and she also created the first interaction design courses for UCLA Entertainment Studies. For more than 15 years she’s been helping large companies, small start-ups, non-profits, and educators rethink their approach to user experience, and build sustainable, genuine loyalty.

Bert Bates is a 20-year software developer, a Java instructor, and a co-developer of Sun's upcoming EJB exam (Sun Certified Business Component Developer). His background features a long stint in artificial intelligence, with clients like the Weather Channel, A&E Network, Rockwell, and Timken.