Follow, don’t lead: Why journalists make great design researchers
Seek truth and report it.
Back in 2014, I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed student journalist who thought she knew everything.
When I pitched and pursued my first stories, I fixated on my interpretation of the truth. This meant I spent little time brainstorming sources to contact, and asked questions littered with assumptions rooted in this “truth.”
A few months into my first gig at the school paper, I interviewed the director of an academic initiative called the Texas English Project. His work analyzed the accents of Wendy Davis and Greg Abbott during their respective campaigns for the Texas gubernatorial race that year.
I wanted him to answer, “What implications does this study have on the race?” He didn’t know, and he didn’t care.
“[This study] can’t help you make your decision — unless all you want is a straight-talking Texan,” he told me.
My mind automatically associated a gubernatorial race with election hot takes. In contrast, his work sought to make sense of evolving accents and language mannerisms—and just happened to find Davis and Abbott intriguing enough to study.
During the interview, I broke a cardinal rule of reporting. I asked leading question after leading question.
That day, while I felt like a failure, I also discovered the value in great reporting, and the basic formula to execute on it: Follow the interviewee down their path instead of forcing them down yours.
Cool story. What about design research, though?
For those who don’t know, design teams (usually product design teams, but not exclusively) use design research to inform what they make.
Here’s how that process usually works: Design researchers immerse themselves in the world of a specific set of users through observation, interviews, surveys, data analysis, testing, the ever-so-nebulous market, and some other methods design researchers will roll their eyes at me for forgetting to mention. Then, they synthesize all of that information, usually couple that with insights, and bring all of it back to their team.
Decode this a bit, and the job starts to sound strikingly similar to that of a journalist.
Instead of interviewing users, journalists interview sources. An article, video, interactive, or podcast acts as an artifact for a journalist’s synthesized information and insights. And instead of bringing this artifact to a design team, a journalist brings it to the public.
A colleague of mine, Nikki Dunagan, started her career as a journalist, and eventually found her way to conversational design. Her day-to-day involves a fair amount of design research, and she told me it was one of the easier parts of her job to figure out.
“Knowing how to talk to people and get information out of them, unbiasedly, was an important skill to have,” she explained.
“When I first started out in the journalist world, I liked to have a plan. I’d go in with a million questions ready and prepared, and would slightly panic when my interviewees would go off script. I learned really quickly that I got the most information out of sources when I talked conversationally and went with the flow.”
She found this lesson transferred well to design research.
“The information I got from users when I just let them steer the ship was so much more valuable and honest.” — Nikki Dunagan
Agenda? I don’t know her.
Let’s be real: Everyone has an agenda. Whether you’re a journalist who wants to uncover something fishy in the government or a design researcher who wants to know why people don’t like your company’s product, you can’t help but think about how the end destination will look, and the steps you need to get there.
But experienced journalists and design researchers know the euphoria and relief of coming out of an interview where someone took them down the road less traveled—a road their imagination could’ve never stirred up.
Amanda Booth (@wordswithamanda) is a Content Designer at IBM. She’s based in Austin, Texas. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
