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Badass: Making Users Awesome
book

Badass: Making Users Awesome

by Kathy Sierra
January 2015
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
294 pages
7h 11m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Badass: Making Users Awesome
113
The Challenge What Experts Do
Science of Badass Building Skills
Practice makes permanent.
Most practice doesn’t guarantee better performance.
Most practice locks-in whatever is practiced.
We must help our users spend as little time as possible
practicing being a beginner at the bigger context (and our tool).
Now we have a big problem: what happens when you’re still
in the Suck Zone? How can you practice being better than you
actually are? We’ll get into that later in the book.
The more time we spend
practicing mediocre,
the better we get at...
being mediocre.
How does Deliberate Practice
help prevent mediocre lock-in?
114
The Challenge What Experts Do
Science of Badass Building Skills
Mastering one tiny useless-on-its-own sub-skill at a time
is nearly always a more effective, efcient way to move
explicitly-practiced skills from A all the way to the C board.
Half-a-Skill beats Half-Assed Skills
A B C
A B C
Typical
learning and
practice skill/task size
Too big
, too many
simultaneous sub-skills
Divide it into ne-
grained sub-skills
Work on THESE,
one at a time
This
NOT this
Effective
learning and
practice skill/task size
Half-a-skill
HERE...
Can’t do
Can do
with effort
Mastered
reliable/automatic
...beats a full
skill THERE
“Half beats Half-Assed”
inspired by Jason Fried
and David Heinemeier ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781491919057Errata Page