When Worlds Collide: The Intersection Between UX and Journalism
By: Allie Kuo and Connor Harrison
Allie was a UX Writing and Content Strategy Co-op at Wayfair in Spring 2021. She will graduate from Northeastern University in May 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in communication studies. She hopes to explore more interdisciplinary opportunities within UX and tech.
Connor has been a Content Strategy Lead at Wayfair since 2019. He graduated from Boston University in 2017 with a master’s degree in journalism before journeying into content marketing and the UX world.
If you asked a journalism student about careers they could pursue with their degree, you’ll probably hear a mix of PR, marketing, even something within politics. What you likely won’t hear is a job in user experience — but why not?
On the surface, UX may seem like a tech-heavy industry, armed with designers Sketching away at a web interface. But there is much more nuance in the roles that make up any UX team. There are content strategists, user researchers, and product managers — along with the engineers and designers, of course.
In the way that design, research, and other facets of UX don’t exist in their own individual bubbles, UX and journalism shouldn’t either. The skills from these fields are highly transferable, creating a unique bridge between the two disciplines.
From J-School to Wayfair Content Strategy
Allie’s perspective
As a newbie to the world of UX, I’m thankful for how much I learned about user experience while immersed in my co-op at Wayfair. But there are also elements of UX that are familiar to me already, just framed in a different way. Writing clearly and concisely for UX? No problem — I’ve mastered the art of succinct writing from journalism courses. Context switching and designing for different users? Covering various beats and verticals as a journalist is great preparation for that.
Think about the breadth of topics you’ve covered as a writer. Local politics is not quite the same as a concert review, and it’s definitely different from a longform interview piece. Yet, this ability to switch between verticals is an effortless process because of your foundational skills as a writer, and this context switching carries over to the world of UX as well.
If I had known in high school that mastering the art of fitting a punchy headline within the character constraints of a newspaper layout could translate to a UX writing career, I probably would’ve entered the world of UX much earlier. But now that I’ve seen the overlap between UX and journalism, it’s clear that the toolbox for each field is more versatile than you might expect — here’s what I’ve learned:
- If there is one thing that is fundamental to these two disciplines, it’s the emphasis on concision. Getting your point across quickly — and efficiently. Part of this has to do with design limitations. While screens technically have limitless space, the user isn’t going to appreciate an abundance of text. When possible, short and sweet is the way to go.
- The second part has to do with focus. Whether your audience is the reader or the end user, their attention span is short. Time is precious, and this is true for both a user flow and a news article.
- And finally, journalism wouldn’t be possible without research, and the same can be said about UX. You would never publish an article without sources and conversations with your subjects, and knowing how to ask the right questions is a crucial skill for any journalist. UX also relies on gathering quantitative or qualitative data to inform UX design and content. Knowing how to tease out insights from users is something that contributes to creating the best experience.
While some fine tuning may be needed to fit your journalism skills into UX or vice versa, the shared knowledge of the two disciplines makes sharpening these skills much easier than starting from scratch.
How Academia Can Prepare Students to Enter the UX Market
Connor’s perspective
Allie pointed out how journalism skills are transferable to UX, but it shouldn’t be solely on the student to make these connections. Schools can help introduce UX fundamentals throughout journalism curricula, and organizations can take steps in their hiring process to reinforce that these skills provide a foundation for roles in content strategy, content design, or UX writing.
At Wayfair, content strategy is defined as the set of rules and guidelines put in place to plan, develop, and manage company content, like UX copy or articles in the Help Center. We’re successful if customers easily comprehend the content they’re encountering and complete user flows — for example, clicking through the screens of the “Checkout” process to purchase an item on Wayfair.com.
The need for concise writing here may seem obvious, but figuring out how the words fit into the design is less direct to journalism. Students will no doubt encounter some basic UX challenges on certain assignments but, like me, may not make the connection to real life UX disciplines.
In my online journalism class, we were asked to build a portfolio website on WordPress. My professor advised us to use the global navigation on the home page to link to a ”Contact” page and an “Articles” page with writing samples. This made sense, but I didn’t realize until I was employed as a content strategist that we were gleaning into information architecture. This is the art of organizing and labelling websites or pages to make it easy for the user to find what they need. For content strategists, this is an integral part of organizing user flows.
To crack the door open to the UX world, instructors could make the connection to subjects like information architecture in the discourse of the portfolio assignment: “In addition to publishing your articles in WordPress, make sure you’re organizing your website so visitors can easily find your publications. I’ve linked to a few readings in the syllabus if you want to learn more about information architecture.”
To open the door a bit more, maybe instructors could give a brief lecture on navigation, such as the differences between a flat site hierarchy and a deep hierarchy. They could also introduce UX laws that apply to designing a portfolio website. For instance, the Serial Position Effect states that users tend to remember the first and last items in a list, so you might place your strongest articles in that manner.
Reading Between the Job Lines
Sometimes semantics blur the connection between journalism and UX in job postings.
At Wayfair we are called content strategists, but the job titles “content designer” and “UX writer” encompass very similar functions. At first glance, the role of a content designer may not punctuate the need for writing and seem like a distinctly different discipline than content strategist. UX writer makes the connection to drafting copy, but it may not be clear that the words are fitting a unique UI with dynamic messaging.
Job descriptions should help clarify this. For instance, a recent Content Strategy Lead posting at Wayfair calls for (but is not excluded to) applicants “with a bachelor’s degree in English, Journalism, Communication, or a related field” and the ability to “understand how design and content work together to provide users with a seamless experience.”
Ideally, a journalism grad would feel more comfortable applying to this role since communication fields are specifically mentioned, while seeing the opportunity to jumpstart their UX knowledge through resources like Nielsen Norman Group or LinkedIn Learning.
No matter where you’re at in your journalism studies, we hope you’ll be deeply fascinated by the UX world and encouraged to find that you’ve encountered some of it already.
