Why are we here? and I don’t mean in a biblical sense I am talking about what do we as designers, software developers and business people. This was the premise on which Kathy started her opening remarks. Hopefully we should all provide the same answer that we all desire to provide something to our users/customers be it a experience or service.

Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users

At the end of the day we are trying to interact with other humans through computers and in this we hit one massive stumbling block is that computers are inanimate objects and can not know what what we feel or think.
So out of the hundreds of people that sat and listened to Kathy people were blogging the session live and twittering it, and messaging about it, and videoing it. So in essence there was no need for most of us to even show up to this conference as we could of sat back at home and watched,listened and read about it online, but what we could not have gained was the human interaction of seeing and being here.

When dealing with computers they do not have the ability to interact with us on this level and what if we are confused or lost. We presume that the user on our site know what they want and why they are here. We spider our site and index all the keywords and provide faq’s but both of these rely on the user/customer knowing what they are looking for. If a customer does not know you product name how will they find it? And if they get lost and click on some form of help will you presume they are in the right location?

Kathy suggests that in addition to the faq’s that we have some sort of “wtf?” Button that allows us to know that the user needs help or is confused/lost.

Once we know the user needs help we should act like a human and ask them a question back to work out what’s wrong and not just chuck them at a generic reference page. Once we have defined what the users situation is we can supply them with a list of relevant questions. As artificial intelligence is not yet possible (hurray up Richard and CJ) we have to rely on static answer and with doing this we should be able to cover the majority of users questions. These questions should be aimed at the users level and be written in conversation language (for example referring to the user as “you” as a very basic level of personalisation).