Writing

In the last few weeks I’ve been in different situations that all reminded me of a key principle in any persuasive communication - no matter whether it be writing, designing, pitching or delivering a report. It is a principle that is absolutely key, and all so easy to forget…

The situations I found myself in were something like this:

• I was writing my new ‘Why choose me‘ page. I started out writing about how fabulous I am and why you should hire me (yes, that’s crude, but go see what most consultants do). Even to me it was boring and dumb and flat and I hated it. So I thought about why I hated it and what I needed to write instead.
• I was helping someone interview candidates for a website manager job. One person really got up my nose - when asked ‘Why do you want this job’ he explained how he wanted to work in a new domain, how he needed a change and how interesting it would be. I spent some time thinking about why he annoyed me so much.
• I was struggling with a content rewrite for a client. It was hard to understand, dense overly-complex and really dull. It was potentially an incredibly interesting topic turned deadly.

On reflection on the similarities between these situations, I realised the problem - in each situation the writer/interviewee talked about themselves and how great they were, instead of talking about the person they were talking to. And I remembered something that I already knew:

Nothing is about you. Everything is about the reader/listener.

I think it was Kathy Sierra who really nailed this a few years ago (and who I would like to thank for her many ideas and insights). She put it so eloquently:

This is the key to every single piece of communication. No-one cares about you, but they do care about what you can do for them.

Remember it, embed it, do everything you can to make other people shine; and good things will come your way automatically.

A funny thing happened to me a few months back that helped me learn something very important about how I write, and writing in general.

As you may know, I’m writing a book (on card sorting). Earlier this year I was up to the point where I had some chapters drafted and thought they were OK, but not great, and couldn’t figure out how to make them great.

So, as is the normal thing to do when writing a book, I sent the chapters to my editor. And as editors do, he read them and gave me feedback.

He pinpointed my problem easily. I had over-structured my writing. Well, I am an information architect, and structuring stuff is what I do. On advice on how to approach the writing process, I had written an outline with points on what to write, then filled in the gaps between the outline with content - explaining each of the points I had included in my outline. I used lots of headings to break up the writing so it wasn’t too dense, bullet points to make it readable etc etc.

What happened was interesting (to me). Because I had written outline points and then filled them in, I pretty much treated them as independent chunks of information. As a result there was a lot of overlap between the chunks, the writing was very choppy and there was not much flow between points.

My editor initially blamed it on powerpoint syndrome - the overuse of choppy structure and bullet points…but I knew better…

Do you know what I think it was? I think it was writing for the web. What do we teach in writing for the web - lots of headings and subheads, lots of bulleted lists, scannable writing, writing so people can read independent chunks and get what they need. That’s what I did - I applied how I had been writing for the web for years and made a miserable mess.

How did I fix it? I pulled out all the headings and bulleted lists and wrote it from top to bottom in prose. I made every paragraph link to the previous and following without using headings. Then, when it was working as an entire flow, I went back and added in headings, lists, pullquotes and other scannable items. But I added those that would enhance the flow, not make the structure.

It was a very, very interesting learning experience for me, and the book is so much the better for it.

My husband asked me a funny question this afternoon:
“Do you need the wireless. I might have to give the box back to (our friend who loaned it to us)”

Aaaaghhh. How do I manage without the wireless? I can’t watch TV and write at the same time, check email while I do dinner or read feeds while my daughter uses the computer in the office.

Luckily our friend doesn’t need it back…I think I owe him one.

I prepared an article for a journal earlier this year. After 2 rounds of edits the editor and I both weren’t happy with the article (it is pretty good, just needed a load more work to get it publication-ready).

The article covered some topics I have not written about elsewhere, or seen much about. It focuses on user research particularly for IA projects, how to analyse research data and how to use the data in an IA project.

So, here it is: User research for information architecture projects (PDF, 218KB)

I’m currently writing an article on information architecture for a special issue of a journal (not sure if I’m allowed to say which one, so I won’t).

I’m working on it alone, so don’t have anyone to sense-check it before it goes in for peer review.

I’m looking for a couple of people to read it for me, make sure it makes sense and give me some general feedback. It is aimed at people who do user research within IA projects, but who may not have loads of experience with this. If this sounds like you and you have time to read a 4000 word article, please leave a comment or email me.

I was stuck on a block of text today - looking at it wondering why it was so damn boring and how I was going to make it interesting. And I remembered something Kathy Sierra had said on a podcast - something that was so important to me at the time I ran to write it on my whiteboard (I’d link to the podcast, but do you think I can refind anything these days).

She said, in talking about writing, to keep asking questions - “Why”, “Who cares”, “So what”, just like a 5 year old, until the answer is ‘or you’ll use your job’.

So I asked myself why, who cares, so what and realised I had written the exact wrong stuff. I had described the answer to a question but not answered it. I thought about why I was writing that particular piece, changed it around and it was great.

So now I just have to remember to do that to every paragraph…

Mum: What are you doing
Me: Reading
Mum: I thought you were meant to be writing a book, not reading one
Me: But I ran out of words today and need to top up

I’m so funny…

I’m reading ‘The Best Software Writing‘ at the moment and have found two pieces that are both beautifully written and compelling in content. You can read them online, and I encourage you to do so (or buy the book of course):

• Paul Ford’s Processing Processing which is a wonderful ramble about elegance, the web, the world and his attempts to make something better
• Paul Graham’s Great Hackers which is an insgightful discussion about what it takes to be an amazing person (not just an amazing programmer, although that’s his pitch)

There are other great articles in the book (and I’m only half-way), but these two really grabbed me. They are great pieces of writing. They are also quite personal pieces, which I think supports the message. You don’t have to agree with it to be moved.

I’m very excited to let you know that, between now and the end of the year, I will be writing a book on card sorting. Specifically, it will be about how to use card sorting in information architecture and similar projects. I think it will fill an important gap – there is some material about how to run a card sort, but little on how to actually use the outputs.

My book will be one of the first published by Rosenfeld Media, a new publishing house focused on producing short and practical books on user experience design. RM will be applying UX methods to determine what books to publish and how its books should be designed. RM will also be incorporating users’ input as much as possible throughout the writing process, primarily via a blog and dedicated site for each book. You can find mine at the Card sorting book website and monitor it via an RSS feed:

I’d love to hear from you about your experiences conducting card sorts and have set up a survey to help collect this. It is short – 10 questions – and should take no more than 10 minutes:

Card sorting - your experiences (survey)

I’m really looking forward to working on the book, and hope you’ll consider participating by sharing your suggestions. Send comments and ideas via the site or to me at (cardsorting -at- maadmob -dot- net).

I’m reading William Zinsser’s ‘On Writing Well‘ (which is amazingly good). Apart from the beautiful writing and must-remember ideas (all duly highlighted), I’m struck by how much of what he says is applicable for user research and design work.

I’m reading the chapter ‘Writing about people’, in which he says:

• Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does–in his own words
• Take heart. You’ll find the solution if you look for the human element. Somewhere in every drab institution are men and women who have a fierce attachment to what they are doing…Find these people to tell your story and it won’t be drab

To me, this is the beauty of doing user-centred design (true user-centredness, not just glib methodology). People are amazing and, moat importantly, the people who we may stereotype as boring or ‘not-as-smart-as-us’ are so very interesting. Almost everyone has an unusual passion that does not relate to their work - it may be their grandchildren, their collection of rare orchids, their daily work with their animals or their love of a particular style of wine. This is what makes people tick, and these are the people who we are meant to be working for.

For me, the most rewarding part of my work is getting to know very interesting people of all types - teams I work with and people I design for. Zinsser obviously has the same interest and I think is a reason his writing resonates so strongly for me.

It’s true - attractive things really do work better. And attractive sites really are nicer to write for.

I redesigned my site recently. It was awfully, awfully ugly. And because of that, I rarely bothered to write much content. I wrote for the blog, which was only moderately ugly, but the main part of the site was a particularly bad example of my work.

But now that I have redesigned (the entire site, including the obscure bits) and actually like my site, I find myself updating it more often. Just fixing things, tweaking the content, adding new pages, clearing the dust out of the corners, keeping it nice and shiny. Generally liking it and taking care of it like I should.

There is an important message here - not only for me, but for anyone who manages a site with distributed authors. Why don’t they keep their content up to date? Well, maybe they don’t like the site and don’t really feel like they want to take care of it. And the remedy to that is obvious.

I’m currently reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and I just a complete flow moment. I sat down to jot down some notes about a new project (which is a secret for the moment) and 10 minutes/1000 words later I actually felt the flow stop. All of a sudden the words weren’t falling out of my fingers and I had to think of what I was writing. And now I have a headache.

Man, I hope the flow comes on next time I sit down to write. That was one of the most amazing feelings I have ever experienced. I just had to tell you.

Over on maadbooks, Kenneth pointed out an interesting usability problem with my posts. I often finish an entry with an ellipsis (…), especially when I have posted something that is a bit vague or when I don’t make a proper conclusion.

RSS readers indicate that there is more to read with an ellipsis, which is sensible as it does indicate ‘more’. So when he reads one of my lazy posts that end like this, he thinks there may be more, goes to check and doesn’t find anything new. Not a good user experience!

I have broken my so, habit. Now its time to break my ellipsis habit and start to write conclusions rather than sentences that drift off. We’ll see how I go.

I love presenting but struggle to prepare presentations. I know exactly what I want to talk about but what I struggle most with is preparing presentation slides.

The presentations that I enjoy watching are those with lots of diagrams, screen shots and illustrations that provide something interesting to look at and support the speaker’s story. But they aren’t great as take-aways - they don’t make sense without the story. And the presentations that I hate most are those with lots of bullet points, however well they support a story (personally, I also find that they stop my story flow as I am as drawn to the words as everyone else is).

I was pleased with some of the IA Summit presentations this year that included diagrams and photographs in the slides, with speaker notes for reading later. This is great, but still has a disadvantage - it takes a lot of paper to print out - Powerpoint at least doesn’t have an option to print both slides and speaker notes with multiple slides per page.

So I came up with a neat trick to get around this - a way to tell a story with illustrations, and provide listeners with notes to follow up later. It’s dead easy as well. I create my presentation with a slide containing an illustration followed by a slide with relevant notes and bullet points. Then I ‘hide’ all of slides with notes. They don’t appear when I’m presenting, but they print out. So listeners get a good set of notes, and I don’t have to once show a bulleted list on the screen.

How cool is that!

(come and see me practice this at our new seminar - Latest Thinking in Usability and IA, July 29, Canberra, Australia.)

I realised today that I’m a bit obsessed by word counts when I’m writing. I just can’t help myself - have to keep checking to see what I’m up to. I wish that Framemaker had a section on the status bar that kept count - then I wouldn’t have to click 4 times each time I want to check. And I wish that it could count whole books instead of individual files. And I wish that I could get it to ignore headings. And I wish…

Ohhhh…this is getting bad…

(but I did write around 3000 good words today…wanna bet on how many I do tomorrow)