Empathy: where product design and journalism intersect: a UX perspective

Using a holistic approach to create online tools that encourage people to strengthen their digital media literacy skills

In September 2022, I was hired as one of two product designers for The Voices Listening Project. The VLP itself is a journalism-centric research initiative based in Arizona, which was led by local student journalists from Arizona State University and Wick Communications, which is a community media company headquartered in Sierra Vista but running publications across 11 states in the U.S.

The VLP’s mission is to understand the news consumption habits of audiences hailing specifically from small, rural communities. With misinformation becoming increasingly widespread with the rise of online media (which was especially evident during the peak of the COVID-19 virus in 2020), the team was funded by the Google News Initiative to collect survey and ethnographic data from 4 select Arizonan towns. This ultimately would support the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) phase of prototyping new, digital solutions that would provide credible, trusted local news for diverse news audiences.

Although I was hired at the tail-end of this year-long project, I still found myself in a unique position as someone with an academic UX background contributing to a field I had no extensive familiarity with (although I did have a strong interest in journalism entering college). However, I would argue that that is the exciting part of being a UXer — although it is commonly perceived as a tech-heavy industry, UX in practice can be applied to nearly any type of problem space. Whether you are a UX team of one or are a UX professional working on a multidisciplinary team, as long as your solutions are based on human-centered design, the methodologies can be widely adaptable to the enterprise at hand.

During my time at the VLP, I recognized 3 key similarities in the way UXers and journalists approach product development and management:

1. Iterative research is crucial.

Broadly speaking, everyone does some level of research to make informed decisions in their every day lives. But to be an efficient journalist, you must delve into the situation and consider all external contexts that are relevant to it. By understanding the social, environmental, and economic influences on an event or subject, this information will help you pinpoint which locations you need to visit, who you should be talking to, and what questions you need to ask. Depending on the rate of ongoing development of your story, your reporting process will most likely rely on consistent research. This is the same expectation in design thinking.

Design thinking is a non-linear, repetitive process that all UX specialists follow to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. For example, UX Researchers may refer to a portion of this process to guarantee their insights are addressing the problems that their stakeholders are concerned about, and UX Designers may use it to ensure their solutions accurately address their users’ needs.

One of many illustrations depicting the iterative cycle of design thinking — notice how empathy is the first phase that encourages research into the problem?

2. Storytelling is relevant in more ways than one.

When reading any body of text, people will look for a cohesive plot line that is easily followed from the beginning, middle, and end. With journalists, their “product” is a published article that can convey purpose — its worded in a way that will make a certain group of people care. Side note: that “purpose” can vary due to a number of factors, such as the journalist’s beat and reporting and geographic biases.

As a UX practitioner, storytelling is a skill that allows you to effectively present your findings and solutions to a variety of audiences. This may include stakeholders that have have heavy decision-making powers regarding your project, and it can also include external teams or clients that are not familiar with UX at all. Basically, being a great storyteller means to be cognizant of your immediate audience’s background, using common vocabulary to easily make connections in your insights that are relevant to their concerns, and knowing what parts of your work process are absolutely crucial to present (and what can be left in the footnotes) depending on their needs.

Understanding these different definitions of “storytelling” was quite interesting, especially in the context of what the VLP was doing. The journalists I worked with were mostly concerned in how they documented their research in a white paper, whereas I found myself using storytelling to explain to said colleagues about how we should apply the insights from our ethnographic research.

One of my biggest talking points focused on how our tools need to be built from a place of understanding — we cannot expect our target audience to be so willing and eager to change their existing news consumption habits, or to even download an online tool that would penalize them based on their inability to identify false news or bias, for example. Therefore, I communicated this perspective by basing it on a general value I knew both UXers and journalists shared: education.

Because our MVPs would be built on the qualitative data that reflects our target audience’s set-in-stone characteristics (attitudes, values, and mindsets), our tools need to be self-paced, non-invasive, and purely instructive. The intent is NOT to influence our users to ascribe to a certain ideology, but rather give them the resources so they can naturally learn to identify bias in new articles and outlets.

Needless to say, we all came to agreement on this direction for development.

3. A passion for advocacy is a must.

In the context of the VLP, all the journalists onboard were equally eager about raising awareness about the rise of misinformation and wanting to create new solutions that help those who are the most impacted or influenced by it. I would go as far as to say that most (if not all) journalists would/should prioritize this as part of their job. Advocacy is a characteristic that is known all too well by UX’ers, mostly because many of us had to advocate for UX in our own jobs across all sort of industries, especially in teams that had low UX maturity.

But beyond that, UXers typically build their own brand and find projects that align with their own values and passions, which are evident in their portfolios. For me, I advocate for projects that support community-building, ethics in tech, personal creative development, and “human good” (which I categorize as mental, physical, and social well-being). It’s not that everyone has to love their job, but when you work in a field that requires you to advocate for people (like journalism and UX), I would say it most definitely helps.