You first

Posted June 5th, 2009

Kathy Sierra used to give a talk in which she pointed out how companies just don’t get it. One of her examples was her camera — which she loved. She wanted to know how to capture running water or some other scene that caught her eye and the camera manual was an inaccessible mess built around the various knobs and buttons on her camera.

Bert Bates has been tweeting about this theme for people writing technical books but it applies to authors of all books. He urges authors to focus on what the reader wants and needs to do. He’d even rather you didn’t tell the reader everything–instead focus on the few things “your reader must get and remember.”

Kathy and Bert created the Head First series and have been very generous with their ideas. We were in a group of geeks who followed James Duncan Davidson around on a photographer’s tour of Brussels. We followed a local host who walked us past many different settings as Duncan talked to us about what caught his eye and how he might best capture it. Kathy asked a ton of questions that helped her understand what Duncan was looking for and what he thought about when he pointed and shot. He covered aperture and light settings but they were the tools he used–they didn’t come first.

It was as if knowing how to operate the settings were the scales he had practiced for years. He had taken enough shots while varying each knob that now the notes were available to him now that he was improvising and playing music.

This all clicked into place while I walked past the Apple store the other day in San Francisco. “There’s an App for that”.

Their ads don’t say “Urban Spoon runs on your iPhone. It can find you nearby restaurants.” They would say something like, “Say you’re hungry and want to know what’s nearby that you might enjoy.” Their ad starts with your desire and gives you a solution instead of saying here’s an app and here’s what it does.

Last week the Pragmatic Life editors met for lunch and talked about our books in this context. We’re trying to learn from those that came before us but we aren’t creating a derivative series. As much as we love the work of Kathy and Bert, the Life Series books aren’t Head First books… they are You First books.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog