Adaptation of "Journalists are UXers Too!" presentation for an audience of product development and product management professionals.

1. JOURNALISTS ARE
(PRODUCT) PEOPLE TOO
5 TIPS WORTH STEALING
FROM REPORTERS & EDITORS @ROBCOLENSO

2. ABOUT ME
Today:
Product manager
& UX strategist
Back in the day:
Journalist, covering
military affairs
and national
security policy

3. So …
What can we
learn from
this guy?

4. 1. Finding Empathy
2. Interview Techniques
3. Synthesis & Sense-making
4. Storytelling
5. Content-First Design

5. FINDING
EMPATHY

6. “Empathy is about standing in
someone else's shoes, feeling
with his or her heart, seeing
with his or her eyes.”
– Daniel H. Pink

7. find your
inner extrovert

8. embrace
discomfort

9. be vulnerable

10. “The problem wasn’t that we
didn’t write about them, it’s
that we didn’t write for them.”
– Lydia Polgreen

11. INTERVIEW
TECHNIQUES

12. “Don’t be an examiner.
Be an interested inquirer.”
– Studs Terkel

13. ask why

14. hone your
note-taking

16. when you
close your
notebook …
listen

17. Also:
Interviews
don’t always
go the way
you planned …

18. SYNTHESIS &
SENSE-MAKING

19. “Kill your darlings, kill
your darlings, even when
it breaks your egocentric
little scribbler’s heart,
kill your darlings.”
– Stephen King

20. synthesis is
a team sport

21. question your
assumptions
(we still believe, Pluto!)

22. seek unusual
perspectives

23. STORYTELLING

24. “The story is a machine for
empathy. It is a … powerful
tool for imagining yourself in
other people’s situations.”
– Ira Glass

25. find a hero

26. build a
narrative

27. the classic
story arc

28. edit ruthlessly

29. INTERVIEWER
How much rewriting do you do?
HEMINGWAY
It depends. I rewrote the ending to ‘Farewell to Arms,’
the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.
INTERVIEWER
Was there some technical problem there?
What was it that had stumped you?
HEMINGWAY
Getting the words right.
The Paris Review,
Issue 18,
Spring 1958

30. CONTENT-FIRST
DESIGN

31. “There is no such thing as
information overload.
Only bad design.”
– Edward Tufte

32. Start by inventorying

33. Practice
progressive
enhancement

34. Think
small

35. “A lot of what you do as a
journalist is about understanding
how people process, absorb and
make sense of information, which
is so critical to doing web design.”
– Jesse James Garrett

36. THANK YOU.
@ROBCOLENSO