Kathy Sierra

Kathy Sierra worked as a game developer, interaction designer and learning specialist, and created the first interaction design courses for UCLA Entertainment Studies. With Bert Bates she created O’Reilly’s best-selling Head First series of programming books, and she founded the JavaRanch community site. She wrote the popular, now discontinued, blog Creating Passionate Users, and is the author of Badass: Making Users Awesome (2015), which shifts the focus of user experience from making a great product to making users who are great at what the product helps them do.

In these talks, Kathy Sierra focuses on making users skilled and capable rather than simply satisfied. Badass: Making Users Awesome (Mind the Product, 2016) and Making Badass Developers draw on cognitive psychology and her background in learning, touching on flow and user engagement. The talks are relevant to anyone working on user engagement, persuasive design or context-driven design.