Creating Passionate Users

Which user's life have you changed today?

Who in your company gets the emails/stories from your users? Too often the good stories are routed to PR/Marketing (the success stories that make for good testimonials) while the rest of us (programmers, customer service, etc.) get all the complaint emails. Yes, we like hearing about how great our product is, especially when we did the work. But it's the stories about how the company/product/service/cause has changed someone's life--that matter to those of us doing the actual work. And sometimes the way a user's life is changed is not at all what we'd expect. Let me tell you a story about how an employee of one company changed the life of a user in a most surprising way...

In January I gave a presentation at CUSEC to software engineering students. After my talk, a young man named Edward Ocampo-Gooding came up and said that he was interested in writing technical books--even more than writing software. A little weird--especially given that this kid (according to others at the conference) was apparently a super high-IQ rocket science type--but OK, I'll bite. But then he told me why he wanted to write tech books, and I nearly fell over...

It all changed for him when he got a product called Swift3D from a little company called Electric Rain. He was so impressed with the product manual--yes, you heard that right, the frickin' manual that comes with the product--that he was inspired. Since it's not every day (or for me, any day in my entire life) that you run into someone who is not just impressed with a company-supplied product manual but actually motivated to potentially change the direction of their career... I HAD to know more. I asked Edward to send me a detailed explanation of exactly what it was he liked so much about that manual.

But that's only half the story.

A few weeks after that event, O'Reilly hosted a four day intensive "author's bootcamp" for everyone who was either signed to write a Head First book or on the verge, plus a few editors--around 20 people. It was several days of training, workshops, writing, storyboarding, etc. So, I decided to invite this kid. I said, "If you can make your way here, we'll put you up and you can be part of the bootcamp. It's an opportunity... we've only done this twice in three years."

Edward showed up, was a wonderful addition to the group, and now it's just a matter of he and the editors figuring out which book he should do first.

So, some guy (Nick Petterssen, who it turns out wasn't even a tech writer) working for a small software company (Electric Rain) cares enough about users to go way beyond what's needed and write a killer, inviting, memorable user manual. As a direct result, an engineering student from Canada will end up as one of the youngest O'Reilly-signed authors. Nick, and Electric Rain, changed the direction of a user's life in a substantial and unexpected way. All because of a manual.

A manual designed to help users kick ass.

(Or as Nick later told me, "Our goal is that the user has to do something cool within 30 minutes.")

In another twist, after Edward told me about the manual, I Googled them only to learn they're located about 100 yards from my favorite running trail in Boulder. One of the most motivating moments for me was when I sat down with the folks of Electric Rain and discovered that--based on the philosophy (and talent) and overwhelming concern for their users--the manual really wasn't anything that special. Just one more natural result of the way this company--and especially the people who are part of it--do things. In fact, Electric Rain is one of the main companies I'm writing about in the book, because they meet so many of the criteria on our checklist for creating passionate users. (Much more on them in another post.)

So, we might be touching or changing our user's lives in ways we cannot imagine. The point is not how their life could change, it's that we are part of making that happen! And it doesn't have to be Change with a capital "C". It could be change with a lowercase "c". If you help me learn more about photography in a way that inspires me to take better photos and develop a passion, you have changed me. If you teach me something I thought was too difficult to learn, you've changed me. If you help me rekindle the joy I once felt for programming, you have changed me. According to psychologists, people report that the times they spend in flow are among the happiest moments of their life. Which means...

If you help me kick ass and spend more time in flow, you have changed me.

How are you changing (lowercase "c") your user's life? How could you? More importantly, do you have a way to find that out? MOST importantly, are you sharing those stories with everyone doing the work and not just PR?