Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

POWER USERS ARE YOUR MAVENS
In his influential bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the
“mavens” who are always trying new products out and then raving about those they love.
They’re the catalysts of the most powerful means of advertising, word of mouth. On the
web, power users are our mavens. These are people who are always quickly learning the
newest interfaces, commands, and gestures; they want more out of their product and they
max out the efficiencies and enhancing features it offers them, like keyboard shortcuts,
gestural commands in touch devices, or simply some options to configure an interface to
the power user’s preference. You never want to leave them behind. Facilitating power
users is definitely the marker of great UX. It means that the product offers a level of
usability above the base and lets users take more control of their experience.
The goals of creating a great experience for power users and scaling up do not have
to be considered mutually exclusive by any means. One company that’s winning at both
scale and a great experience is Seamless, the food ordering and delivery service. The
largest value they offer is standardizing the UX of restaurant delivery, which sets them up
well for going larger scale. But they also offer great options for power users, such as a
feature that lets you reorder meals you’ve previously ordered. This is a simple shortcut to
offer that’s also unobtrusive to those who don’t want to use it, and in effect it creates
power users.
Efforts to create power users are easy to make mistakes with; you’ve got to be sure to
keep your eye on the ball of the largest base of users. The first step of being free to focus
on appealing to power users is creating consistency in the product that makes it enjoyable
for everyone; that then becomes the base for building in shortcuts and special options. And
in creating those, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel; consider the UX of other products.
Lots of shortcuts are common across products; they’re like design patterns for power
users.