Part Two: The product · Getting good
Every new skill makes a person slow and clumsy for a while. Most give up during that stretch, before the product has had a chance to make them any good.
A man of fifty downloads a piano-practice app because he wants to play. For the first weeks nothing he makes sounds like music. A piece he has practiced for an hour still falls apart at the same bar. He wanted to be someone who plays, and his own ears tell him he is not.
Kathy Sierra calls the line he has to cross the "suck threshold." Below it, a person is bad at the thing they care about, and knows it. Most quitting happens there, and it is quiet. People decide they have no talent for it.
Makers misread this stretch as a problem with the interface. Part of it is. Every minute spent hunting for a control uses attention, and whatever the tool takes is not left for learning the work. But a newcomer can find every button and still be bad at the piano.
So the product has two jobs. The first is to get out of the way: ask a newcomer to learn less of the tool at first. The second is to help with the work itself. Give them one thing they can do well early, a short piece chosen to sound good at half speed, so there is a result to be proud of.
And tell the truth. "Everyone's left hand lags for the first month" does more for a learner than cheerfulness, because it says the trouble is ordinary and has an end.
Crossing the line is where it starts to be worth it. The aim is a person who is better at the work than they were before they found the product.
Therefore:
Find the stretch where newcomers are bad at the work they came to do, and make it short. Spare their attention, give them one thing they can do well early, and say that the awkwardness is normal.
In practice. Ask people who stopped in the first month, as well as customers a month in, what they could not yet do well in their second week. Those answers are the awkward stage. Makers cannot recall it for themselves.
Goes with. People cross the line faster when they LEARN BY DOING (35) and when someone will SHOW WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE (41). What comes after the line is THE PATH TO EXPERT (42).
The phrase "suck threshold" is Kathy Sierra's.