Badass: Making Users Awesome — Insight into what makes certain offerings shine (book)

"Do the enduring successful products and services share common attributes? Can we learn by studying them? Can we reverse-engineer 'sustainable success'? Not exactly. The answers to what makes a sustainable bestseller aren’t in the successful product. The answers are in the successful product’s users. It’s not the product success that matters most, it’s the successful results of those who use it. Repeatedly. Consistently. Sustainably. The answer to a sustainable bestseller is to shift the focus from making an awesome product to making an awesome user of that product. The answer lies is helping users become badass not just at using the product, but at whatever it is the product can help them do and be. And some of those answers are surprising, counterintuitive, but can be implemented by anyone at any stage in a product’s development. Even if you can’t improve your product, you can still improve your user’s experience by designing for what happens after they use it. Badass: Making Users Awesome is a course in how to create a context in which users can become more skillful, and, most importantly, to stay motivated to keep moving forward. Everything our users experience is part of that context, and even the smallest improvements can have a dramatic impact."

Kathy Sierra's two "Minimum Basass User" talks are mandatory viewing for every startup imo: http://businessofsoftware.org/20... http://businessofsoftware.org/20...

This book should be required reading for creators of every course, software, or other product before it reaches Product Hunt. It's that good.