58
The Challenge
Prologue Think Badass
How do you help your user be more
interesting at a dinner party?
Thought Experiment: User at a Dinner Party
Designing for the post-UX UX means designing not just for your
users but for your users’ users.
It’s not so much what our user thinks of us but what our user’s
friends, family, peers think of our user.
Imagine one of your users at a dinner party, and describe what
you do (or could do) to help him be more interesting at that
party. What have you given him to talk about (that isn’t about
you). What have you given him to show?
59
The Challenge
Prologue Think Badass
Thought Experiment: Search And Replace
How can we get more
social media followers?
How can we help our user
get more social media
followers?
How can we get more
comments on our posts
and photos?
How can we help our user
get more comments on her
posts and photos?
How can we get people
talking about our brand?
How can we help our user
get people talking about his
personal brand?
How can we get people
to learn what we value?
How can we help people
learn what our user values?
Dene our mission
statement
Dene our users’ mission
statement
Design a T-shirt that
makes us look good
Design a T-shirt that makes
our user look good
When you think THIS
Change it to THIS
Imagine you’re in a meeting brainstorming brand perception,
and marketing. Now imagine that instead of asking questions
about your brand, you try replacing “our” with “our users.” It
won’t always make sense at rst, but act as if it does.
60
The Challenge
Prologue Think Badass
“Our users are better at this than their users”
Thought Experiment: your users
competing against their users
Imagine that your competitive advantage is not how you
compare to the competition but how your users compare to
the competition’s users.
Imagine, for example, that instead of marketing based on your
benchmarks, your marketing showed your users’ benchmarks.
Describe or sketch an imaginary ad that shows your users out-
performing your competition’s users at the bigger context:
61
The Challenge
Prologue Think Badass
Somebody has to be the rst user. If our product or service
is new, the goal is the same: create badass users. It does mean
putting energy into getting at least a few initial users who are
likely to become better and are in a context where others will
know about it.
This does not mean getting an “inuencer” to promote the new
thing. Remember the search-and-replace exercise? Instead of
asking “where do we nd an inuencer?” ask “how can we create
an inuencer from a person who is active in our target audience
and most likely to benet from becoming better?”
Later in the book we’ll look at techniques for helping those rst
users recognize they’re getting better, as early as possible, and
increase the chance that others in the target audience will hear
about it.
The best place to begin is to help a few people become
noticeably better at the bigger context, and let word of mouth
and word of obvious emerge as natural side effects.
Yes, we get it. User badass. Our users beat their users,
etc.etc.etc. But this “formula” means nothing if
nobody knows about you.
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