Deborama's WWW Number 15 - Creating Passionate Users

I can't say I like the title of this blog, but the content really is exciting. Pretty much every article has something to think about, or an idea to use, or at least something you can agree with - erm - passionately. So with a name like "Creating Passionate Users", what is this slickly designed, mostly well-written blog about anyway? To me, it seems to be about the psychology of technical design and documentation, especially documentation. The focus is on things like manuals, tools and presentations, and two articles I have chosen to showcase give you an idea of the scope and quality of the writing. The one that first caused me to whack this blog onto my bloglines feed was "Don't expect employees to be passionate about the company" by Kathy Sierra. This happened to pop up in answer to an unrelated search at the very time that I needed to read it to clarify some silent. gnawing fury with the management of my own workplace. The one I just read yesterday, by the same author, is titled "Too many companies are like bad marriages" and concerns the massive gap between the high bucks and emphasis on sales (the courtship phase) and the measly budgets and kludgy values of customer service (the post-honeymoon shock). And of course this article is written from the point of view of American companies - they should get a load of the typical British company, where crap customer service is not only a finely honed skill set but also a hallowed national institution. Other excellent articles include "Are our tools making us dumber?" and "Marketing should be education, education should be marketing". This blog is worth setting aside some reading time for.