One of my alltime favourite blogs is Creating Passionate Users. It's full of tons of useful advice for just about anyone with a product. Its founding principle is that people will use your product if you can make them passionate about it. One thing that the folks at CPU have often pointed out is that if you can make your users passionate about your product, they will forgive you anything. They will overlook the occasional glitch or failure, because they're committed. They'll defend your product to the hilt.
One company that has been great at this has been Google, although I don't want to speak too soon, because the whole enterprise could easily go the way of Microsoft and become as reviled as it is powerful. AppleMacs have the same devout following. Another is Mozilla Firefox, which has its users eating out of the palm of its hand.
I speak from experience, because I have been engaged in an intensely passionate love affair with the Firefox browser for about six months now, and it shows no signs of letting up. Even when it does crazy things like it has been doing all week, Firefox is still my friend, and I won't hear people badmouthing it. It's been freezing up on me periodically for about the last ten days, but still it reigns supreme over every other browser, in my heart at least. The Mozilla team have successfully created a passionate user out of me.
The CTU crew have also made me a passionate user of their blog. Hell, they've even got me giving them free advertising like this. You're doing something right when your users want to go out for free and evangelize on behalf of your product. Check it out.
David, you so made my day with this! Sorry it took me a few days to get around to telling you : )
(Apparently the subliminal messages I've embedded in those 50's graphics are working...)
Cheers and thank-you,
Kathy
Posted by: Kathy Sierra | Saturday, 24 December 2005 at 12:53 AM
Cheers for stopping by, and merry Christmas to you!
Posted by: Dave Rattigan | Saturday, 24 December 2005 at 02:29 PM