Openning remarks, Kathy Sierra, co-founder of the O’Reilly Head First book series

I’m watching this speech from an adjacent “video overflow” room where I can watch the speech on a huge screen rather than in person.

Kathy is baiting all the live bloggers: if you’re blogging this, then why are we here?

There’s something more than just seeing each other… it’s crucial to the human experience.

Kathy tries to get all the designers, coders, and Money people to interact. She baits the designers: If you saw a man drowning, and you could save him or photograph it…. how would you tag it in flickr?

After everyone has shaken hands, the question she poses is, what do we do to bring out more human interaction? We need to design and build our software to:

get people together offline
make software more human

There are tons of ways to get people together; user groups, meetup.com, etc.

Now how do we make software/experience more human?

The computer can’t read your face or understand your gestures.

Kathy reveals that our apps have Aspergers. How do we get them to be aware, defeat the aspergerness? The app needs to know when the user is confused, because no one is passionate when they suck.

Kathy now shows a slide of a chart displaying the “suck threshold”. The designer and coder who can get their app to guide the user past the suck threshold faster.

Give your app the WTF? button. This is different from the interaction with FAQs and Online Help.

Ultimately we have to make your software think like a human…

Start using things like the word “you”. Making the assistance conversational yields higher practical results, higher efficiency, and lets the brain stay in the game. So help people online in the same way that you sould if you were right in front of them. Helping users learn is the key to passionate users. It has less to do with marketing and more to do with passionate users.

Remember, the key is not making a world-changing experience, but improving the life of one user, one experience, one at a time.