Making Badass Developers

In this 2015 talk, Kathy Sierra, creator of the Head First series for O’Reilly, focuses on how people want to be perceived when they use a particular service.

Her argument is that people often want to feel badass, and the products that successfully deliver this feeling are the ones people come back to. The question she leaves designers with is a simple one: how do you make your users feel badass?

Persuasive patterns such as Powers, Levels and Status describe related ways of helping users feel competent and see their own progress.