Creating Passionate Users: The importance of seduction and curiosity

| emacs, passion

“The importance of seduction and curiosity” is another great entry from one of my favorite blogs, Creating Passionate Users. Kathy Sierra writes:

Part of creating passionate users starts with building curiosity. Inspire them to want to learn, know, and do more.

I love making people curious about things, whether it's Emacs,
Planner, computer science, or even far-out stuff like street
performance.

Kathy Sierra gives these tips:

  1. Be passionately curious yourself.
  2. Be seductive.
  3. Make them curious by doing something unusual, without an obvious explanation.
  4. Offer a puzzle or interesting question… without giving them the solution.

Be passionately curious yourself. Heck yeah. I love learning
about things. When people give me feedback on my talk, the first thing
that usually comes to their mind is my enthusiasm for the topic. Even
when I can't go into a lot of detail about something like Squeak, they
pick up on the fact that I think it's really interesting and something
worth being curious about.

Be seductive. I often do my Planner help that way when the
person I'm talking to expresses interest in learning Lisp. I'll take
them partway to a solution and leave enough for them to figure things
out. Even with the hacks we put together for Planner, there's always
that tantalizing glimpse of what _else_ could be possible.

Make them curious by doing something unusual, without an obvious
explanation.
This is why I've taken to starting my Knoppix
presentations with a Windows display. ;)

Offer a puzzle or interesting question… without giving them the
solution.
Oooh, still have to figure out how to do this one
properly.

Fun.

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