Day 3–Learning From Journalism: Balancing impactful communication with compassionate storytelling

— Greetings from Canada! As UX-ers face challenges in work today, and a few ideas to solve them through writing

— What are challenges?

• Want findings to have greater impact with teams and clients and something unique to contribute and want stories shared with you are maximized and honored through process

— Desire to demnstrate value of work and clearly

— Why is this so hard to do though in an organization with premium for time and attention?

— You were probably trained in two ways, as an academic communicating to audiences of like-minded specialists and can be technical or opaque or marketer that focused on persuasion

— Both suffer from same flaw

• They withhold the details the audience wants the most, until the very end, and this suspense is building with books, movie, TV, and can feel evasive and manipulative

— Shouldn’t make colleagues work hard to figure out what we learned

 

— You are building suspense instead of trust, so communicate in this way does dis-services to the work

• Take page from journalists

— Will share best practices from teaching journalism to students and work experience

— One big picture idea and micro-level tips as well

— Why journalists?

• If you think about it, trained to do similar things, and synthesize large amounts of information and combining with stories and epxeriences of real popele
• Communicate and in short, direct and engaging kind of way

— Can use key techniques to highlight insights and key user stories

• Also makes you look like straight shooter at work and opens up more time for discussion questions

— Let’s dive in

— Use inverted pyramid model and works well with age of social media and designed to share details of story in descending importance, and finish of with most important information

• Broadest point of triangle is information with broadest people to most people and down to most narrow part of it

— Having taught this model, it doesn’t intuitively work for many people, but pay attention to organizing principle of most important info first and then to least important info

• Philosophy for this approach was that telegraph lines were vulnerable to storms and ice, and ran risk of message going down — so sent out highest priority info first, even if cut off halfway through
  • Interesting info might be lost, but not the germane takeaways
  • Think of own work and how you present it
    • If someone sat in first 10 minutes would they grasp the key takeaways— probably not

— In many ways depressing, in knowing that people will read top 1/3rds at best, and lot of effort for good stuff and what’s most interesting comes first, and bottom 2/3 is examples and more explanation

• Not all audiences are the same and ranking information depends on audience you are presenting to and stakeholders
  • Knowing audience and greatest interest is really key

— Good example of a police statement that is exaggerated and police reports follow linear chronology of what happened

• This past weekend XYZ happened where mobile zoo disappeared and animals escaped it including a cobra, and two pythons

— Classic burying the lede— putting the most important stuff on top

— For inverted pyramid model, and pulling out facts and details and rearrange from most important to least important

• Focus on snakes loose in Grand River Hall, and nature of threat to students

— See same details, but clear example of what audience will think from most to least important

— Organizing info this way, and people have sense of dumbing it down, and have complex sophisticated ideas to share, and using organizational principles, and taking time to explain complex issues in a way for audience to understand

— More about what writing typically looks like:

• May have executive summary, but can be formatted with introduction, backgrounds and context, results and findings, conclusions, discussion

— Clients have to wait long time and drowned in context and methods and take classic format along with what we figured out for you and detailed results and findings and discussion questions at the end

— What about context and methods?

• Important to you and your team, but most people don’t care

— So how do we use the inverted pyramid in UX research writing?

— First thing to do process wise is rank your information, and think we can do this, and most important thing— so write it out

• List out all information you want to share and stuff to share and physically rank from most important to least important

— Rank them all and what’s most important and ranking what is least important is 1,2,3 and middle chunk of what fact 15 should be and fact 16 to direct decisions

— Focus on distilling your message overall, and organize points you ranked in order, and making space for points 1-13 and bring back to pyramid model and crucially important information

• Then have useful to know
• Interesting and not essential to grasping the world

— Rerank until you find something that works

— Maximize user stories and time given you and make sure highlights their stories, look through data for quotes that exemplify points you are trying to make

— In pyramid model, rank from most important to least important, and use story that supports that point and user story that supports it and braiding and weaving user stories and research

— Small scale example of this with research fact, i.e. half say they will stop using it, and user story to emphasize main point

• Exemplifies broader picture

— Looking at own presentation and scripts in way, will get positive change

— Also micro-level tips as well

— First, write grammatically simple sentences, with straightforward direct sentences, and okay if you read it

• Too many commas indicate grammatical complicatedness and too hard to understand

— Then use active voice to put subject in the sentence, and at the beginning, with subject-verb-object

• Easier to understand and hear

— Reduce zombie sentences, and put active decision makers into the sentence

— Great to do, and the more you talk about it, and in vague kind of way and make audience for information to share

• The more granular the data the better

— Choose plain, everyday language instead of technical language, and meet people where they are at.

• Plain conversational words for people to grasp easily and thinking about at friend of grocery store, what are words you’d use to describe something to a friend

— Doing this comms change will be long-term project and will feel radical if not used to presenting info, but it will highlight value of work and user material you have and give users the respect they deserve

• Compassionate for you and users in the long run

— So lay groundwork slowly and outline logic behind new comms approach and will go a long way

• Start slow with internal comms, and giving the goods upfront

— Read the news, especially hard news, will allow inverted pyramid style to sink in more, and people in org already doing this work

— Finally it’s worth to do, and it helps for you and makes audience more open to what is sent out, and of user stories gathered

— I hope this was helpful, and thank you for listening

Q&A

1. Interested in adjacency between changes researchers and writers have been adapting to changes?
   1. Heartened to see this and coming from journalism wanted to see if something could be easy to take in. Interested to see how kinds of academic fields are moving to plainer direct style of comms, and getting successful vaccination methods to people— and meet people where they are at
   2. UX is ripe for change as you have great user information and not presenting numbers but great anecdotes with stories and comms
2. How helpful given world we live in and use of AI in sharpening practices?
   1. Depends on model, but have found it can’t be clear and concise. Sounds very robotic, with lots of errors, and don’t sound like human wrote it
      1. Value of clear direct conversational style, is that you feel like person communicating with you, and making effort to make it easy to understand
      2. AI doesn’t to do great job of it, compared to generosity of human being writing it
3. How to balance authentic voice and tone with business writing?
   1. Journalists got it wrong in setting humanity side and turning off world views or not.
      1. Room for authentic voice, and having it sound like you
   2. Make case with something that sounds the way you speak and write.
   3. Authentic writing voice and it sounds like you than any objective script — be you and better than anyone else can