For me, the hardest part of an interview is listening back to the recording. I’ve had enough practice not to hate how strange my voice sounds, but no matter how great the content is, I’m always disappointed by the overlapping “mmhs” I always add in solidarity with my source. And the crinkling paper. And the pen drops that my handy-dandy Zoom never fails to record.

But, maybe there’s more to those “mmhs” and little interruptions than we all thought? I’ve been reading Storytelling for User Experience, and finding a lot of great parallels between storytelling and listening for UX that can be directly applied to interviewing.

“Good listening can be addictive,” writes Quesenbery and Brooks. “If you have ever been really listened to, then you know its power. We then want it, even crave it and seek it constantly.”

Even though listening to someone speak seems simple enough, we’re more used to not being listened to. We’ve developed “highly effective defense mechanisms”—like raising our voices or pausing at the threat of interruption—which detracts from really listening. Or really telling the story we want.

Those paper crinkles and pen drops, however subtle, are interruptions that prevent you from really listening, and might ultimately prevent the source from sharing her deeper thoughts.

Here’s a list of five tips on learning to be a good listener via Mind Tools and Storytelling for User Experience:

1. Pay attention. Give the speaker your undivided attention and acknowledge the message.
2. Show that you are listening. Use your own body language and gestures to convey your attention.
3. Reflect back. Show that you understand what is being said by paraphrasing and summarizing periodically.
4. Defer judgment. Allow the speaker to finish. Don’t interrupt.
5. Respond appropriately. Be candid and open in your response.

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Sounds easy enough, right? But if your audio sounds like my audio, you’ve got a little bit of work to do. Your source—and your story—will thank you.

—Wendy Joan

(Photo by Melvin Gaal)

“A few well-chosen stories might be just the thing to get everyone to put down their Blackberries and join the conversation.”
—Storytelling for User Experience

Photo by: Britta

Where taken: Connecticut

Camera used: Sony Cybershot

It was the last summer before we all had babies. Eat Media was less than a year old, and we took the business “on the road” for the month of August. This was our first stop: our friends’ lake house in Connecticut. We would work until 4pm or so, go water skiing and then go back to work. This photo captures the freedom we felt that summer. The freedom to invent the business and the life we want.

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Photo by: Wendy Joan

Where taken: The Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple), Amritsar, India

Camera used: Sony Cybershot

I spent most of 2007 living in Pondicherry, India, with eight rowdy American girls and one French guy. That May, three of us travelled more than 1,700 miles north to Amritsar. Shortly after arriving, I quickly snapped this photo outside the gates. The sun was shining straight in my eyes and I couldn’t see a thing. We spent the next few days exploring the temple and Punjabi countryside before heading for the Himalayas. I so close to Pakistan I could have touched it through a chain link fence, and would have done so if the border patrol didn’t have such big Kalashnikovs and so much ammunition.

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—Wendy Joan

We recently launched a redesign for a university magazine (finally!) and thought we’d pass along some of our favorite tips for making your own custom publication better.

1) Rethink your magazine architecture

BEFORE A front of book section that didn’t evolve with the magazine’s needs. Too many new sections had been added over the years, and the naming convention was starting to not make sense.

AFTER Help readers hold their place by redesigning the flow of the entire reading experience. For example, we converted several choppy sections into one umbrella FOB section that encapsulates the university’s mission. We gave the client a menu of various columns/formats that can be rotated in and out of this section from issue to issue.

This new format also creates a stronger branded magazine that a) is not re-invented each issue and b) begins to build recognition with readers.

2) Kill the “Wall of Words”

BEFORE Each page had one story and an average of 550 words. There were excessively long narratives about a single source. An earlier attempt to break up this text with subheads was ineffective because subheads were the same size/style as the body text.

AFTER Chunky, colorful, big and juicy. Get away from a traditional narrative style—there are a million ways to tell a story. Put two or three stories on a spread and let stories cross the gutter (which also means you’ll greatly increase the number of voices in each issue). Make numbers and subheds stand out from body text. Update your fonts.

Even better, ask yourself if your story could be more quickly communicated in a chart or graphic. For inspiration, start collecting “charticles” from New York, Esquire and Good. Think those publications don’t apply to your trade pub? Check out what Inc. has been up to lately. Bring some much-needed inspiration to your weekly status meetings by sharing examples from Information Is Beautiful.

3) Don’t tell a life story in every story. Or any story for that matter.

BEFORE A 150-word piece about an award recipient, once in the hands of marketing and product stakeholders, morphed into a 600-word monstrosity.

AFTER Focus on a tiny sliver of the story. Do this by establishing very clear column descriptions and criteria (complete with word counts!) in your redesign. For example, one of the goals of this particular magazine is to get alumni to re-enroll. So we created a column called “How it Paid Off” which essentially demonstrates the “ROI” of spending thousands of dollars on an advanced degree. This could easily eat up 1,500 words. Instead, we created a list format:

HOW IT PAID OFF

Name/Degree
Job title before degree
Job title after degree
How my degree helps me make a bigger impact
Biggest benefit of earning my degree at x university.

We captured this in 102 words. In and out.

4) Use better art (without necessarily spending more)

BEFORE Stale headshots, outdated stock illustration styles, far too many “grip and grin” photos

AFTER Instead of sending distant sources to their local mall photo studio (shudder!), we worked with the same art budget and hired photographers across the U.S. who could capture environmental portraits (hint: get your sources outside). We also pushed sources for submitted images and gave them ideas on what we wanted to see. When we got good images, we ran them big. We saved the standard headshots for thumbnails (or not at all).

5) Remember: What’s important to your administration is probably not what’s important to your readers

BEFORE Too much real estate given to university news, and placed where the university thought it belonged—right up front. Long articles covering university events that already happened.

AFTER With a 2x/year frequency, news is not a primary purpose of this magazine. So we moved news section to back of book and capped the word count for each “brief.” (Again, build this criteria into your redesign. The more “rules” you can establish up front, the better chance you have against word creep.) Each news piece ran with a call to action to get the full story online (interested to see the metrics on those redirects).

For event coverage, which used to eat up spreads at a time, we offered up one 1/3 column where we ran big, chunky sound bites. Outcome? We were able to “cover” four events in 139 words.

What would have made this project even better?

A print-to-web integration, which is something all clients should include as a mandatory line-item on their publication budget.

Check out some great examples from min online.

Ready to launch your own redesign or improve your print-to-web integration?  Give us a shout.

—Britta

Eat Media Window Quotes:

“Being obscure is great position to be in.” — Jason Fried	“Let’s make something stellar. Or, keep rockin’ that same-old, same-old.” — Ian
“Language is weird somewhat whimsical governor.” — D. Sheilds	“We need to stand up and fight for two things at all costs: great ideas and company culture.” – D. Oyrt
“An out of date footer is like a limp handshake.” — Ian	“Work calmly, joyously and recklessly with whatever is at hand.” — H. Miller

Mustering up the motivation to create anything fruitful is tough on a Friday afternoon, especially with the long weekend to look forward to.

Here’s what inspired us over at Eat Media this week. Hope it gets your wheels turning.

Ian:

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability & Science of Customer Centricity and the DIY ethos of Hip-Hop culture—lifting yourself up and making things happen. Not waiting for a handout. The Jay-Z story.

Wendy

Islamic dress. MTV did this great True Life documentary on kids in Saudi Arabia gracefully refusing to accept the societal norms of their parent’s generation.  I can’t stop thinking about Fatima, a 20-year-old from Jeddah who is making and selling her own brightly colored abaiyas. They’re beautiful and I want one.

And M.I.A.’s Agitprop Pop by Lynn Hirschberg. I still can’t decide if I like M.I.A. more or less after reading Hirschberg’s profile, if she’s smarter than all of us, or just feeding into her own idea of what a rebel should be. A good profile will keep you guessing even after you’re done reading.

Lindsay

This talk by Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Rick Bragg at a recent conference. The video is half comedy routine, but it’s a nice refresher on feature writing.

And 1st Books: Stories of How Writers Get Started, a site that offers insight into how to get started if you’re a first-time author.

—Wendy Joan

Media moves really fast. And (apologies for the cliché), if you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss some really great pieces.

Below are my picks of the week. Enjoy!

—Wendy Joan

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Being and Frumpiness, New York Times Style Magazine

Last week, Knopf published a new translation of “The Second Sex,” Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist masterpiece . . . This latest translation got us thinking about de Beauvoir’s accidental style statements — about her whole amazing, intellectual frump thing. Digging into the New York Times photo morgue, we’ve come up with what must be the world’s first “Simone de Beauvoir Look-Book.” Which is nothing if not reductionist and superficial.

407: The Bridge, This American Life

I first met Patrick three years ago, sleeping in a cardboard box … Considering his circumstances, what was surprising wasn’t so much that he ended up living in a box under a bridge, but how he had come to be right there, precisely. His probation officer, he said, had ordered him to live there.

China’s Arranged Remarriages, New York Times Magazine

So staggering was the scale of destruction unleashed by the Sichuan earthquake that, much like the Haitian quake in January, its horror was often reduced to a series of statistics: more than 87,000 dead or missing, nearly 400,000 injured, upward of five million homeless …

Looming over the physical reconstruction, however, has been another question: How can society rebuild? In China, one answer has been to pair grieving men and women to create instant families that will help ensure social and economic stability.

Covering ‘Tainted Justice’ and Winning a Pulitzer, Fresh Air

GROSS: So after you broke this story, there were threats against you, a lot of nasty things said, press conferences, threats to sue you?

Ms. RUDERMAN: Oh, yeah.

Ms. LAKER: Yeah. We had that early on, one attorney told us if we ran the first story, he would sue us and close the paper.  I mean, we had a lot of threats like that, but Wendy and I really believed in this story.

Jenny Shimizu and Susi Kenna, Style Like U

The first time I saw myself as a model was when my friends woke me up at four in the morning and took me to Times Square. I saw the Banana Republic billboard that I shot with Bruce Weber. There was just a picture of my face, and underneath, it said ‘American Beauty.’ It still makes me have the chills. Never in my life did I think that I was beautiful.”

(Simone de Beauvoir photo by Charles Hewitt/Picture Post/Getty Images, China photo by Wang Gang for The New York Times, Style Like U photo by Stylelikeu.com)

Three quick content tips from Paul Boag. Simple stuff, but everything is so much better when orated by a a Brit.

—Ian

Web people just loooove Zappos.com.

I’m an avid online shopper and a lover of all things shoes, yet I’ve never bought in to the Zappos hype. Why? Here’s why.

Most popular women’s sandals on Zappos.com:

As a new mother of two, I’m one bad click away from Keens, Danskos and “FitFlops.” I don’t need any encouragement.

Meanwhile, over at Piperlime, the trusty “comfy and cute” search option offers me this:

Which means Piperlime wants to make sure I don’t show up on the next episode of What Not to Wear.

And I appreciate that.

When it comes to fashion, I don’t want to wade through all the Teva look-alikes to find the good stuff. Because truthfully, I don’t trust myself to make good decisions. I need somebody to present some carefully edited items and say, “Here. These are your options.”

Because if you spend too much time looking at Keens, Danskos and “FitFlops,” you start to think, “Well these ones aren’t so bad…”

—Britta

A few weeks ago, I decided to prepare and can my own pickles for the first time. Without an expert canner to guide me, I obsessively read up on the dos and don’ts of pickling and canning.

I found the process to be quite easy and enjoyable, as long as I adhered to the steps. Back in the office, I triumphantly told Jonathan of my success, and he said, “there must be some sort of connection between pickling and content strategy.”

There is. And here they are—what preparing pickles can teach content writers:

1. Do your prep work. My grandmother was an excellent pickle-maker, and her secret weapon to ensure delicious and crunchy pickles is an ice bath. Before you even get started on the pickling, you need to soak the sliced cucumbers in ice for at least three hours. You can’t rush this part of the process, even if it does eat up most of your Saturday afternoon.

Before you start writing, you need to put in the time and do the essential research that will inform your writing. Thoroughly read your background sources, and spend the time referencing additional sources that will strengthen your piece. You want to put in this time BEFORE you get going—if you don’t, you might end up with a less-than-appetizing finished product. No one likes soggy pickles, and no one likes less-than-compelling content.

2. Don’t forget to wear your gloves. Having decided that my pickles should be both hot and sweet, I spent the better part of an hour carefully slicing countless jalapeño and poblano peppers. I was more careless than careful, and the oils from the peppers seeped into the pores on my hands, and painfully burned for the rest of the afternoon.

When writing potentially hazardous content, be sure to wear gloves. If you don’t, you might continue to feel the pain even after the piece is complete.

3. Sterilize. If you don’t wash, dry and sterilize your mason jars and lids, you could end up with poisonous pickles.

Same goes for content writing: you want to make sure that your piece is germ-free, clean and entirely your own content. Even the slightest bit of unwanted substance puts the entire jar at risk.

4. Listen for the ‘pop.’ When your mason jars are packed full of pickles-to-be, you place the sealed jars in a hot water bath and boil for 10 minutes to process.

After carefully removing the jars from the hot water with a pair of tongs, they’ll begin to cool. Over the next hour or so, you’ll hear a loud ‘pop’—which means that the jars are air-tight, and the seals have taken properly.

Before your draft becomes a completed piece, you need to make sure that it ‘pops’ as well. Read the piece aloud. Does it have that Je ne sais quoi that makes the article shine, or do you need to take a step back and re-process?

5. Store in a cool, dark place. Being a pickler requires patience. After you have canned the pickles, you need to let the jars sit for at least two weeks to let the spices infuse the cucumbers. You could eat them earlier, but they probably wouldn’t taste much like—or nearly as good as—properly aged pickles.

Writers rarely have the luxury of sitting on a piece for an extended period of time. Unless you’re on a tight deadline, do allow any time you can spare apart from your writing. Be patient. Walk away. Sleep on it and revisit in the morning with a clear head. You’ll see something that you didn’t before.

Your pickles (and your content) will thank you.

—Wendy Joan

(Jalepeno photo by Beau B, mason jar photo by Brown Eyed Bombshell, Pickle photo by Wendy Joan)

You’re making your readers angry. Stop it.

Content strategists often get very wrapped up in the concrete deliverables of the content creation and production process, and that’s understandable, because they are the sorts of things that are easy to make into line items in a proposal budget. If there is a sexy part of content strategy, it’s content creation and delivery.

But the final piece of the content strategy puzzle is often the part that gets the least thought and fewest resources once the sexy part of a project is “completed.” Of course we are talking about site maintenance, one aspect of content governance.

In the olden days, many sites often had a “contact webmaster” link that would often open an new email, or send you to some onerous form, or worst of all, send you to an FAQ page that had the sorts of questions that no one had ever or would ever ask.

Even if you were able to send a message about your problem, the chance of getting any sort of meaningful reply was vanishingly small, if you received a reply at all (That’s right, I’m talking to you, Newsvine. You’ve never responded to TWO queries about my account. But hey, I’m just one more ANGRY user who no longer partakes of your product.)

But all those user inquiries do go somewhere (even if it’s an unmonitored mailbox or some sort of auto-reply bot), and how those emails are handled is going to go a long way toward making your users happy. Anytime you can get a kind human response out of a computer means a lot to the puzzled and frustrated human on the other end.

Here are several tips on how to be the best website manager you can be:

1.    Know thy CMS. Chances are if you are the one checking the system admin inbox you are also the person updating the content on a regular basis. If you were really lucky, you got to participate in the design and beta testing of the site, so you’ll have fixed many of the UX flaws that might have made your visitors angry. But, inevitably, there were items that got pushed to “YourSite 2.0” and some wonky features that got left “as is” because no one wanted to go to the trouble/expense of fixing them, rationalizing that, “people would figure them out.” Regardless of how you ended up where you are (and how bleak that landscape might be), learn your platform inside and out. Know how the content needs to be tweaked in the back end so it looks and performs its best on the front end. Whether you’re using Joomla, Umbraco, or, God forbid, RedDot, you must become one with your CMS.
2.    Be a problem solver. The vast majority of people aren’t writing in to pay you a compliment. They have an issue. Give them an answer. And if you can’t give them an answer, or if you know the answer to their question isn’t going to make them any happier, apologize, sincerely.
3.    Take accountability to the next level. If you see the same issue cropping up over and over again, don’t blame the users; take a hard look at your site and fix what you need to in order to create a better and less frustrating user experience.
4.    Become an expert in the site’s subject matter. If you are running a site about cars, you better know your bias-plys from your radials. This is going to make your job easier in the long run and is going to make the provision of excellent customer service faster and more reflexive.
5.   Be nice. You will be asked stupid questions and you will be asked them over and over again. It may be the 10,000th time you’ve been asked something, but to the person on the other end, it may be their first experience with your site. Make sure it’s not their last.
(And for the truly off-the-wall questions, have a sense of humor. Years ago, while working at a ski resort in Colorado, questions like, “At what altitude do the deer turn into elk?” and “When it gets really busy, do you use both side of the chairlift?” were commonplace. Roll with it.)
6.    Be open to new ideas. You will receive a lot of suggestions about how to improve your site. Some of them will actually be good. Politely thank everyone and quietly implement the best ideas.
7.    Know when to escalate. Some people will be asking about your products and services. You should consider this an epic fail for your site and something that rates pushing the panic button if it happens too often. If people are contacting the webmaster and asking how to buy your products, you have a huge UX problem.

Most of what you need to know about being a website manager you learned in kindergarten. Be kind, helpful and patient. Listen. Share your knowledge. This is all basic stuff, but considering how rare it is to encounter it in the wild, it certainly deserves another mention.

—Jonathan
@bentpiton

Photo of The Minotaur and The Hare by Jim Linwood