#for a question like that the relevant experts are lexicographers

[sufficientlylargen]

This post is really weird to me, because on the one hand I'm with OP on finding anti-science sentiment extremely disturbing, but on the other hand the staunch belief that every word has exactly one True Meaning, and that anyone who uses it differently is stupid or anti-intellectual, is itself a part of anti-science movements.

Maybe this will surprise some of my followers, since obviously I love stupid semantic arguments like 'if you cut a ravioli in half is it a sandwich?'¹, but one of the reasons I like them is because, despite their sillines, they point to the important truth that words are, fundamentally, made up. The "meaning" of a word is not determined by the inventor of the word, nor by some "higher authority" like a dictionary or a scientist, but by how people use it. That's what it means to ask "what does word X mean?" - you're asking "what do people mean when they say X?". And this is a vitally important thing to think about, because you can't communicate with someone unless you know what they mean by the words they choose.

The idea that colloquial definitions matter is NOT new, not at all, and to say it "has no basis in reality" is just false. It's false when it's about dinosaurs, it's false when it's about planets, it's false when it's about sandwiches, it's false when it's about genders; it's just false! Linguists call this approach "prescriptivism" - the idea that language is defined by a set of formal, rigid rules, and the only "good" or "correct" usage is to follow those rules. But the alternative, "descriptivism", is the actual evidence-based approach to language - to find out what a word means, you have to observe how people use it, because that's what determines the meaning.

Descriptivism isn't anti-science or anti-intellectual - if anything, the ones in denial about reality are the prescriptivists who say that 'dinosaur' CAN'T mean "giant extinct lizard" despite the fact that there exist people who use it that way and so that is in reality one of its meanings.

And obviously it's fine to dislike certain usages - I loathe the expression "I could care less" because it's a corruption of "I couldn't care less" and has the same meaning despite its literal meaning being the opposite.

But I still accept that "I could care less" means "I couldn't care less", even though I wish it didn't, because if someone says that to me I know that's what they mean.

In the same way, if your four-year-old niece asks for a dinosaur toy for her birthday you know that she's not asking for a stuffed penguin, and if your friend says "I just watched that dinosaur movie from 2000", you know they're not talking about Chicken Run².

tl;dr: the argument here isn't about the historical or biological relationship between avian and non-avian dinosaurs, it's about the real-world usage of the word 'dinosaur', and the reality is that one of that word's meanings is, in fact, 'large extinct lizard from millions of years ago'. It's not the definition paleontologists use, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

¹ It's still a ravioli if it's from the Ravenna province of Italy, otherwise it's a sparkling bread bowl full of thick soup.

² Unless they're a paleontologist or someone who loves playing with language. No generalization is ever completely accurate.

New Fear

I have been on tumblr a long time. A looooong time. Far longer than I should have been, really.

And I've been arguing with schmucks about birds being dinosaurs... pretty much that whole time. Folks tend to get angry when a dinosaur blog posts birds, after all. It happens.

And while the game of whack a mole is ancient, it's not unpredictable. Usually, it ends in one of two ways:

the person admits they were wrong, and they back down

the person stops arguing with me and blocks me

I'm okay with either one, really. the former is ideal, the latter at least brings me peace.

Never before this past weekend has someone insisted they were right no matter what I say

And this isn't a coincidence.

Over the past few decades, anti-science sentiment has risen worldwide. I mean you just have to look at the COVID19 pandemic, or general reactions to the problems of climate change.

While of course people who think their opinion matters more than evidence have always existed, they have never been quite this bold before.

The idea that the colloquial definition of dinosaur matters, at all, is a completely new idea and one that has no basis in reality.

And yet, multiple people this past weekend argued exactly that.

And it sounds exceptionally similar to the idea that people could pick and choose things about COVID19 to believe, or the general republican position on science (only things that back up their bigotry are true).

It really seems to reflect a general increase in anti science sentiment and public anti-intellectualism.

Reality isn't actually up for debate. Reality isn't actually subjective. And science is the measure of reality

This isn't the same as the biases of society impacting science and making it worse. Saying "what people think is more important than science" is not the same as saying "science forgot a very important variable / factor / to consider data gained by different cultures / to have a wide variety of perspectives/ etc."

And allowing people to continue to perpetuate and believe in delusions leads directly to the spread of misinformation, leading to more people not understanding reality, and so on

This matters because reality matters. Because the reality of our world is not something we can change or escape. And, in fact, us ignoring the reality of the world - like thinking we can have infinite growth on a finite planet - is directly leading to the destruction of that world (climate change).

I am terrified of the rise of anti-science sentiment. I am terrified of the rise of cherry picking, deciding reality is what you want it to be, ignoring evidence. We see this from purely scientific topics all the way to social justice (how much of racism is ignoring the evidence of a) race being a social construct and b) how much racism impacts people's lives? Almost all of it).

This is bigger than birds being dinosaurs or evolution or climate change. This is about our society going on a deeply disturbing and self-destructive path.

And I really don't know what to do about it.

[superlinguo]

Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a Communications Specialist

A lot of the stories in the linguistics jobs interview series involve people studying linguistics and then starting a career in a particular industry (or two, or three). Today’s interviewee, Julia Shenkar, was working as a communications specialist when she returned to study a Masters of Linguistics. Julia is a Senior Campaign Communications Specialist in the Healthcare Division of SEIU (the Service Employees International Union). You can stay in touch with Julie and find out about her work on Twitter and LinkedIn.

What did you study at university?

I went to undergrad at Knox College in Galesburg, IL, and was a double major in Nonfiction Writing and French. I got my Master's in Linguistics at George Mason University, just outside of Washington, DC. Mason's program is focused on theoretical linguistics, though I am a sociolinguist a heart. My research focused primarily on English phonology and morphology, though I ended up developing a secondary focus on Haitian Creole kind of by accident. I wrote my thesis on sound symbolism in product names.

What is your job?

I moved to DC soon after graduating undergrad and got a job in nonprofit/association marketing, communications, and PR. My current job is at the Service Employees International Union where I serve as a senior campaign communications specialist. My current and previous work has involved writing op-eds, press releases and statements, website copy, newsletters, social media content, internal and external marketing copy, and blog posts, as well as managing relationships with the media through pitching and facilitating interviews between the press and organization leadership. I also have experience in crisis communications, publishing, event planning, and project management.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

Having a linguistics background helps me approach language differently. My academic training has given me the gift of perspective, and I have a deeper consideration and sensitivity toward the greater implications of words and sounds, written or spoken, for different audiences. I'm a strong copyeditor, and colleagues usually come to me for grammar/syntax questions. I'm also usually the first person people ask to help them come up with puns, acronyms, or plays on words.

But I'll admit—being a linguist outside of academia is tough. I often get hung up on nuances that seem trivial to laypeople. Additionally, it's difficult to be a linguist in a world of native English speakers. No one likes to be told they're wrong or not exactly right regarding a language they've spoken their entire lives, and I've found that people get very defensive. Folks outside of academia may see linguists as arrogant or overly exhaustive when it comes to English. You have to learn to pick your battles. Part of being a linguist is respecting everyone's language ability and using your skillset as a supplement to your greater work, not as leverage to prove a point.

Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I think a lot of recent grads—like me at the time—don't realize that there are job options beyond academic research and teaching, and that majoring in the arts and humanities is not a one-way ticket to unemployment. There are tons of opportunities for communicators in all fields (literally everything), so don't worry about being pigeon-holed into a single discipline.

Think about it: every company or business needs folks to handle their marketing and communications. These employers are always looking for talented people who can use language efficiently to connect with potential customers and audiences. As a linguist, you possess skills not everyone has and you are extremely marketable outside of academia. If you're still in undergrad and have room in your schedule, take a journalism class and learn how to pitch and write news stories. Familiarize yourself with data analytics, SEO, and social media business tools. Also familiarize yourself with AP and Chicago style, as most places closely abide by these rules.

That said, beware the prescriptivist. The jaws that bite, the claws that catch... the professional world is full of Strunk and White loyalists—especially Boomers, who will likely make up upper management. As linguists, we are conditioned to be descriptivists and to understand that language evolves with culture and society. A lot of people you'll encounter consider language to be a black and white issue and will insist on abiding by traditional, sometimes outdated, grammar rules. Take the temperature of your organization and be prepared to write in a way that goes against your linguistic instincts and sounds nothing like how real people speak. You may also have to sit through some English 101 lectures about sub/verb agreement and how passive constructions are evil. Just smile and nod.

Any other thoughts or comments?

Don't think you have to miss out on developing your resume and gaining work experience to stay in academia. Roughly 5 years into my career, I started attending grad school full-time on top of full-time work. I had an 1.5hr commute to campus and evening classes, so this made for some late, late nights. This was very hard—but doable! Good employers know that educated/skilled employees will only enhance business operations, so many places are willing to offer tuition reimbursement or flexible scheduling options to help you be successful. I chose to focus my thesis on a topic relevant to the industry I worked in at the time, so that was a great way to demonstrate my commitment to my employer and inspire more enthusiasm from management—plus, I had immediate, unbridled access to industry experts and data.

If anything, you'll develop killer time management skills. You'll learn to segment (and segregate) your thoughts into work stuff and school stuff, and might end up feeling like you live a double life. I promise it's worth it and you'll emerge as a stronger scholar, professional, and general person.

Recently:

Interview with a Learning Scientist

Interview with an Internet Linguist

Interview with a Lexicographer

Interview with a School Linguist

Interview with a Journalist

Check out the Linguist Jobs Master List and the Linguist Jobs tag for even more interviews  

[douglassmiith]

12 Ways To Improve User Interview Questions

About The Author

Slava is a designer from Ukraine. He works in Berlin as a Designer Manager at ELEKS, a software consultancy, and is a journalist by education. Slava curates … More about Slava Shestopalov …

Right questions don’t simply roll off the tongue, but it’s a handy skill everyone can train. The following pieces of advice will help you to formulate questions that foster reliable answers from your users and clients.

An experienced interviewer takes care of many things: builds hypotheses, selects interviewees, composes invitations, schedules appointments, sets the stage, and, of course, writes an interview script. Any of these preparations can go wrong, but the script failure means all the effort is in vain. So, if you haven’t interviewed people a lot before or you have to delegate it to non-designers, I’d recommend paying attention to high-quality questions, in the first place. Then, there is a chance they’ll smooth out other potential shortcomings.

We’ll talk about 12 kinds of questions explained with examples. The first part includes six frequent mistakes and how to fix them. The second part presents six ways to improve decent questions and take control of difficult situations.

Pitfall #1: Hypothetical Questions

“I don’t care if people will use the new features,” said no budget owner ever. Investing in design and development, people want to make sure money will return. And direct asking, unfortunately, is not an effective way to check it, although it may intuitively seem a great idea. “Let’s go out of the office and ask ‘em!” In my practice, there were a lot of cases when people said they liked a feature but were reluctant to pay for it. So, is there any method to make sure that something not functioning yet will be needed when implemented?

Hypothetical questions put an interviewee into the position of a dreamer, thus don’t provide reliable answers. (Large preview)

I cannot recall anything more relevant than referring to people’s past experiences and behavior in similar situations. If users don’t have a habit of saving articles for later on all the news sites, what is the chance they’ll start doing it on your website? As Jakob Nielsen said, “Users spend most of their time on other sites.”

Pitfall #2: Closed Questions

Closed questions appear from a natural human wish to be approved and gain support. However, in the interviews, they aren’t useful enough. A yes-or-no question doesn’t provoke reserved people to talk and doesn’t help much to reveal their motives and way of thinking.

Open questions help to gather more information than the closed ones. (Large preview)

To be fair, closed questions are not evil. For example, they can serve a handy facilitation technique to make a talkative interviewee stop and turn back to the point. Also, they can help to double-check the information previously received through open questions. But if your goal is to gather as much information as possible, open questions will work better.

Pitfall #3: Leading Questions

The things considered polite in everyday conversations may be harmful to the efficiency of a user interview. Trying to help an interviewee with the options can guide them in saying what they don’t really think. A user interview is not the most comfortable situation for the majority of people, and they try to pass it as quickly as possible and at minimum effort. As a result, people tend to agree with anything more or less close to the truth or with a socially-expected choice instead of composing their answer from scratch.

Questions that suggest answer options lead to biased answers. (Large preview)

That’s why it’s better to move one step at a time and build the next question upon the answer to the previous one.

Pitfall #4: Selfish Questions

Idea authors sometimes act like proud parents — they want everyone to admire their child. The downside of such an attitude in user interviews is the unconscious usage of the pronouns “we” or “our.” As a result, users feel as if they are taking an exam and should either adore what they see or maintain neutrality, disguising real complaints.

Possessive pronouns like “our” provoke people to praise the subject of talk instead of sharing honest feedback. (Large preview)

In your interview script, replace possessive pronouns with neutral words like “this site” and “that application” or just call a subject of conversation by the name.

Pro tip: as an interviewer, you can try hiding or understating your job title and relation to the topic.

Pitfall #5: Stacked Questions

There are many reasons why we ask stacked questions. It can be a human desire to be heard, the fear of being interrupted, or worrying that you might forget the next question while listening to the current answer. However, for the interview efficiency, stacked questions are not an option. Interviewees often select the one they are more comfortable to answer to or the one they managed to memorize from the stack. Remembering questions shouldn’t become the interviewee’s burden, so it’s better to ask them one by one. (And maybe the answers are so comprehensive that you won’t need some of the planned questions anymore.)

A stack of questions leads to a messy answer, whereas a sequence of separate questions works much better. (Large preview)

Pitfall #6: Explanation Instead Of A Question

Teams that work together for some time often establish their own language and tend to bring it into the product they are building. But will users understand such words as “dashboard,” “smart update,” “inclusion,” or “trigger”? Explanatory questions put an interviewee into the position of a lexicographer and help to check what sense (if any) they put into brand concepts and expert terminology. For a designer, it gives insights into how the future product — a website, app, or self-service terminal — should speak to people.

Instead of inserting the explanation into the question it’s better to openly ask interviewees what they think this is. (Large preview)

The opposite side of this approach is explaining it yourself and leading people before they have a chance to share their opinions. Think about this: in the interview, you are superior and can put pressure on users making them get your point. But will you always be there for thousands of users to explain how the product works? Probably no. So, it’s more efficient to discover people’s thinking styles and then create self-explanatory solutions rather than create something and push it in interviews.

We’ve just covered six major interviewing mistakes. The next portion of advice will be about making fairly good questions even more powerful and dealing with difficult interview situations.

Pitfall #7: Question Clutter

Open questions are great until you realize there are too many details to figure out. The best method in such a situation is storytelling — describing a recent or the most prominent experience. As a result, an interviewee talks about a real situation and is less inclined to compose a socially desired answer or summarize various cases.

When a topic is broad, it’s better to ask for a full story instead of a series of open questions. (Large preview)

Besides, storytelling gives the freedom to speak about aspects a person considers necessary. Usually, people start with or talk longer about the most crucial experiences.

Pitfall #8: Too General Questions

When you’ve figured out regularity or general attitude, it’s the right moment to ask the interviewee about an example. Recent-experience questions can fill in the gaps, which might have appeared while answering general questions. For an interviewer, it’s another powerful method to check if users aren’t accidentally exaggerating or dropping significant details.

Past-experience questions give more insight into users’ behavior than general questions. (Large preview)

Pitfall #9: Talking About What You Can Observe

When you are lucky enough and interview people in their “natural habitat,” it’s a perfect chance to see their work process with your own eyes. So, if there is an opportunity to ask a user to demonstrate typical actions — offline or online — you’ll gather tons of insights. It’s a chance to learn about users’ habits (including shortcuts and favorite programs), level of computer skills, software environment, and the way of thinking (mental model).

Sometimes it’s better to witness user’s behavior than to listen to its verbal description. (Large preview)

Pitfall #10: Tolerating Vagueness

Abstract nouns and adjectives, for example, “comfort,” “accessibility,” “support,” “smart,” or “user-friendly,” are probably the trickiest words in the language because everyone interprets them differently. When you hear abstract names, that’s not enough to document them as they are. These words require “unboxing” and only then can support design decision-making.

Abstract concepts need unboxing; otherwise, they cannot back up design decision-making. (Large preview)

“Nothing is clear enough” has become my second favorite slogan after the classical UX phrase “It depends.” “Nothing is clear enough” means that you cannot be certain about the meaning if you hardly visualize a scenario from your interviewee’s life. The best way to unbox abstract concepts is by turning them into verbs.

Pitfall #11: Missing Numbers

Generalizations like “all,” “never,” “always,” “nobody,” “often,” or“frequently” are as unclear as abstract nouns and adjectives. But the way to “unbox” generalizations is different — through quantifying. Basically, you ask questions about approximate numbers or proportions. An interviewee, of course, might not provide you statistics, but at least you’ll understand whether the user’s “very frequent” is about “more than a half” or “nearly 20%.” Another example: the same phrase “a lot” can mean “50 per day” for work emails, but it’ll be only “5 per year” for cybersecurity alerts.

Exaggerated or vague characteristics deserve to be quantified in the interview. (Large preview)

Pitfall #12: Undervalued WH-Questions

As a non-native speaker, I remember these questions from the English classes at school. The teacher often asked us to make WH-questions (What? Where? When? Who? How?) so that we could start a conversation and break the awkward silence. Nothing had changed from school times. Now, as a designer, I often use WH-questions as the main interviewing instrument.

WH-questions are great for figuring out time, locations, participants, consequences, and other details. (Large preview)

My favorite question is “why.” For the sake of politeness and a more friendly atmosphere, I conceal it behind the following phrases, “What are you trying to achieve when you…?” or “Can you please explain the reason/value of…?” This is how in pursuit of a root cause you can ask several “whys” in a row without annoying your interviewee.

Summary

The question techniques above are pretty straightforward and might not take into account the nuances of a particular conversation or interviewee. Of course, even the best questions won’t make all the answers automatically objective, but they can make information more reliable and actionable. All in all, it’s always on an interviewer to adjust according to the situation. Here are the three core principles if you are in doubt about particular questions.

Experience holds more truth than a hypothesis.

That’s why it’s recommended to ask about cases from the past and similar examples from other areas of a user’s life.

Let them tell their story; your ideas can wait

The goal of an interview is to explore the truth, not to sell or demonstrate something. If you force an interviewee to support you, it might mean the rest of the people won’t agree either. Also, give preference to clarifying the unknown versus checking hypotheses — for hypotheses, a better method is prototyping and testing.

If you cannot imagine it, you don’t get it

In a series of 1–2-hour user interviews, it’s so easy to get lazy and pretend you understand what you hear. Try challenging interviewee’s statements in your mind, “Did he say the truth? Do I know why she says that? What exactly do they mean telling me about it?”

Recommended Reading

“The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business is a Good Idea when Everyone is Lying to You,” a book by Rob Fitzpatrick.

“User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them,” an article by Kara Pernice for Nielsen Norman Group.

“The 3 Types of User Interviews: Structured, Semi-Structured, and Unstructured,” a video by Maria Rosala for Nielsen Norman Group.

“The Art of the User Interview,” an article by Nick Babich for Springboard.

“How to Conduct User Interviews,” an article by Interaction Design Foundation.

“First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users,” an article by Jakob Nielsen for Nielsen Norman Group.

“Interviewing Users,” an article by Jakob Nielsen for Nielsen Norman Group.

(cc, yk, il)

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[riichardwilson]

12 Ways To Improve User Interview Questions

About The Author

Slava is a designer from Ukraine. He works in Berlin as a Designer Manager at ELEKS, a software consultancy, and is a journalist by education. Slava curates … More about Slava Shestopalov …

Right questions don’t simply roll off the tongue, but it’s a handy skill everyone can train. The following pieces of advice will help you to formulate questions that foster reliable answers from your users and clients.

An experienced interviewer takes care of many things: builds hypotheses, selects interviewees, composes invitations, schedules appointments, sets the stage, and, of course, writes an interview script. Any of these preparations can go wrong, but the script failure means all the effort is in vain. So, if you haven’t interviewed people a lot before or you have to delegate it to non-designers, I’d recommend paying attention to high-quality questions, in the first place. Then, there is a chance they’ll smooth out other potential shortcomings.

We’ll talk about 12 kinds of questions explained with examples. The first part includes six frequent mistakes and how to fix them. The second part presents six ways to improve decent questions and take control of difficult situations.

Pitfall #1: Hypothetical Questions

“I don’t care if people will use the new features,” said no budget owner ever. Investing in design and development, people want to make sure money will return. And direct asking, unfortunately, is not an effective way to check it, although it may intuitively seem a great idea. “Let’s go out of the office and ask ‘em!” In my practice, there were a lot of cases when people said they liked a feature but were reluctant to pay for it. So, is there any method to make sure that something not functioning yet will be needed when implemented?

Hypothetical questions put an interviewee into the position of a dreamer, thus don’t provide reliable answers. (Large preview)

I cannot recall anything more relevant than referring to people’s past experiences and behavior in similar situations. If users don’t have a habit of saving articles for later on all the news sites, what is the chance they’ll start doing it on your website? As Jakob Nielsen said, “Users spend most of their time on other sites.”

Pitfall #2: Closed Questions

Closed questions appear from a natural human wish to be approved and gain support. However, in the interviews, they aren’t useful enough. A yes-or-no question doesn’t provoke reserved people to talk and doesn’t help much to reveal their motives and way of thinking.

Open questions help to gather more information than the closed ones. (Large preview)

To be fair, closed questions are not evil. For example, they can serve a handy facilitation technique to make a talkative interviewee stop and turn back to the point. Also, they can help to double-check the information previously received through open questions. But if your goal is to gather as much information as possible, open questions will work better.

Pitfall #3: Leading Questions

The things considered polite in everyday conversations may be harmful to the efficiency of a user interview. Trying to help an interviewee with the options can guide them in saying what they don’t really think. A user interview is not the most comfortable situation for the majority of people, and they try to pass it as quickly as possible and at minimum effort. As a result, people tend to agree with anything more or less close to the truth or with a socially-expected choice instead of composing their answer from scratch.

Questions that suggest answer options lead to biased answers. (Large preview)

That’s why it’s better to move one step at a time and build the next question upon the answer to the previous one.

Pitfall #4: Selfish Questions

Idea authors sometimes act like proud parents — they want everyone to admire their child. The downside of such an attitude in user interviews is the unconscious usage of the pronouns “we” or “our.” As a result, users feel as if they are taking an exam and should either adore what they see or maintain neutrality, disguising real complaints.

Possessive pronouns like “our” provoke people to praise the subject of talk instead of sharing honest feedback. (Large preview)

In your interview script, replace possessive pronouns with neutral words like “this site” and “that application” or just call a subject of conversation by the name.

Pro tip: as an interviewer, you can try hiding or understating your job title and relation to the topic.

Pitfall #5: Stacked Questions

There are many reasons why we ask stacked questions. It can be a human desire to be heard, the fear of being interrupted, or worrying that you might forget the next question while listening to the current answer. However, for the interview efficiency, stacked questions are not an option. Interviewees often select the one they are more comfortable to answer to or the one they managed to memorize from the stack. Remembering questions shouldn’t become the interviewee’s burden, so it’s better to ask them one by one. (And maybe the answers are so comprehensive that you won’t need some of the planned questions anymore.)

A stack of questions leads to a messy answer, whereas a sequence of separate questions works much better. (Large preview)

Pitfall #6: Explanation Instead Of A Question

Teams that work together for some time often establish their own language and tend to bring it into the product they are building. But will users understand such words as “dashboard,” “smart update,” “inclusion,” or “trigger”? Explanatory questions put an interviewee into the position of a lexicographer and help to check what sense (if any) they put into brand concepts and expert terminology. For a designer, it gives insights into how the future product — a website, app, or self-service terminal — should speak to people.

Instead of inserting the explanation into the question it’s better to openly ask interviewees what they think this is. (Large preview)

The opposite side of this approach is explaining it yourself and leading people before they have a chance to share their opinions. Think about this: in the interview, you are superior and can put pressure on users making them get your point. But will you always be there for thousands of users to explain how the product works? Probably no. So, it’s more efficient to discover people’s thinking styles and then create self-explanatory solutions rather than create something and push it in interviews.

We’ve just covered six major interviewing mistakes. The next portion of advice will be about making fairly good questions even more powerful and dealing with difficult interview situations.

Pitfall #7: Question Clutter

Open questions are great until you realize there are too many details to figure out. The best method in such a situation is storytelling — describing a recent or the most prominent experience. As a result, an interviewee talks about a real situation and is less inclined to compose a socially desired answer or summarize various cases.

When a topic is broad, it’s better to ask for a full story instead of a series of open questions. (Large preview)

Besides, storytelling gives the freedom to speak about aspects a person considers necessary. Usually, people start with or talk longer about the most crucial experiences.

Pitfall #8: Too General Questions

When you’ve figured out regularity or general attitude, it’s the right moment to ask the interviewee about an example. Recent-experience questions can fill in the gaps, which might have appeared while answering general questions. For an interviewer, it’s another powerful method to check if users aren’t accidentally exaggerating or dropping significant details.

Past-experience questions give more insight into users’ behavior than general questions. (Large preview)

Pitfall #9: Talking About What You Can Observe

When you are lucky enough and interview people in their “natural habitat,” it’s a perfect chance to see their work process with your own eyes. So, if there is an opportunity to ask a user to demonstrate typical actions — offline or online — you’ll gather tons of insights. It’s a chance to learn about users’ habits (including shortcuts and favorite programs), level of computer skills, software environment, and the way of thinking (mental model).

Sometimes it’s better to witness user’s behavior than to listen to its verbal description. (Large preview)

Pitfall #10: Tolerating Vagueness

Abstract nouns and adjectives, for example, “comfort,” “accessibility,” “support,” “smart,” or “user-friendly,” are probably the trickiest words in the language because everyone interprets them differently. When you hear abstract names, that’s not enough to document them as they are. These words require “unboxing” and only then can support design decision-making.

Abstract concepts need unboxing; otherwise, they cannot back up design decision-making. (Large preview)

“Nothing is clear enough” has become my second favorite slogan after the classical UX phrase “It depends.” “Nothing is clear enough” means that you cannot be certain about the meaning if you hardly visualize a scenario from your interviewee’s life. The best way to unbox abstract concepts is by turning them into verbs.

Pitfall #11: Missing Numbers

Generalizations like “all,” “never,” “always,” “nobody,” “often,” or“frequently” are as unclear as abstract nouns and adjectives. But the way to “unbox” generalizations is different — through quantifying. Basically, you ask questions about approximate numbers or proportions. An interviewee, of course, might not provide you statistics, but at least you’ll understand whether the user’s “very frequent” is about “more than a half” or “nearly 20%.” Another example: the same phrase “a lot” can mean “50 per day” for work emails, but it’ll be only “5 per year” for cybersecurity alerts.

Exaggerated or vague characteristics deserve to be quantified in the interview. (Large preview)

Pitfall #12: Undervalued WH-Questions

As a non-native speaker, I remember these questions from the English classes at school. The teacher often asked us to make WH-questions (What? Where? When? Who? How?) so that we could start a conversation and break the awkward silence. Nothing had changed from school times. Now, as a designer, I often use WH-questions as the main interviewing instrument.

WH-questions are great for figuring out time, locations, participants, consequences, and other details. (Large preview)

My favorite question is “why.” For the sake of politeness and a more friendly atmosphere, I conceal it behind the following phrases, “What are you trying to achieve when you…?” or “Can you please explain the reason/value of…?” This is how in pursuit of a root cause you can ask several “whys” in a row without annoying your interviewee.

Summary

The question techniques above are pretty straightforward and might not take into account the nuances of a particular conversation or interviewee. Of course, even the best questions won’t make all the answers automatically objective, but they can make information more reliable and actionable. All in all, it’s always on an interviewer to adjust according to the situation. Here are the three core principles if you are in doubt about particular questions.

Experience holds more truth than a hypothesis.

That’s why it’s recommended to ask about cases from the past and similar examples from other areas of a user’s life.

Let them tell their story; your ideas can wait

The goal of an interview is to explore the truth, not to sell or demonstrate something. If you force an interviewee to support you, it might mean the rest of the people won’t agree either. Also, give preference to clarifying the unknown versus checking hypotheses — for hypotheses, a better method is prototyping and testing.

If you cannot imagine it, you don’t get it

In a series of 1–2-hour user interviews, it’s so easy to get lazy and pretend you understand what you hear. Try challenging interviewee’s statements in your mind, “Did he say the truth? Do I know why she says that? What exactly do they mean telling me about it?”

Recommended Reading

“The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business is a Good Idea when Everyone is Lying to You,” a book by Rob Fitzpatrick.

“User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them,” an article by Kara Pernice for Nielsen Norman Group.

“The 3 Types of User Interviews: Structured, Semi-Structured, and Unstructured,” a video by Maria Rosala for Nielsen Norman Group.

“The Art of the User Interview,” an article by Nick Babich for Springboard.

“How to Conduct User Interviews,” an article by Interaction Design Foundation.

“First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users,” an article by Jakob Nielsen for Nielsen Norman Group.

“Interviewing Users,” an article by Jakob Nielsen for Nielsen Norman Group.

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source http://www.scpie.org/12-ways-to-improve-user-interview-questions/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/620485446118621184

[scpie]

12 Ways To Improve User Interview Questions

About The Author

Slava is a designer from Ukraine. He works in Berlin as a Designer Manager at ELEKS, a software consultancy, and is a journalist by education. Slava curates … More about Slava Shestopalov …

Right questions don’t simply roll off the tongue, but it’s a handy skill everyone can train. The following pieces of advice will help you to formulate questions that foster reliable answers from your users and clients.

An experienced interviewer takes care of many things: builds hypotheses, selects interviewees, composes invitations, schedules appointments, sets the stage, and, of course, writes an interview script. Any of these preparations can go wrong, but the script failure means all the effort is in vain. So, if you haven’t interviewed people a lot before or you have to delegate it to non-designers, I’d recommend paying attention to high-quality questions, in the first place. Then, there is a chance they’ll smooth out other potential shortcomings.

We’ll talk about 12 kinds of questions explained with examples. The first part includes six frequent mistakes and how to fix them. The second part presents six ways to improve decent questions and take control of difficult situations.

Pitfall #1: Hypothetical Questions

“I don’t care if people will use the new features,” said no budget owner ever. Investing in design and development, people want to make sure money will return. And direct asking, unfortunately, is not an effective way to check it, although it may intuitively seem a great idea. “Let’s go out of the office and ask ‘em!” In my practice, there were a lot of cases when people said they liked a feature but were reluctant to pay for it. So, is there any method to make sure that something not functioning yet will be needed when implemented?

Hypothetical questions put an interviewee into the position of a dreamer, thus don’t provide reliable answers. (Large preview)

I cannot recall anything more relevant than referring to people’s past experiences and behavior in similar situations. If users don’t have a habit of saving articles for later on all the news sites, what is the chance they’ll start doing it on your website? As Jakob Nielsen said, “Users spend most of their time on other sites.”

Pitfall #2: Closed Questions

Closed questions appear from a natural human wish to be approved and gain support. However, in the interviews, they aren’t useful enough. A yes-or-no question doesn’t provoke reserved people to talk and doesn’t help much to reveal their motives and way of thinking.

Open questions help to gather more information than the closed ones. (Large preview)

To be fair, closed questions are not evil. For example, they can serve a handy facilitation technique to make a talkative interviewee stop and turn back to the point. Also, they can help to double-check the information previously received through open questions. But if your goal is to gather as much information as possible, open questions will work better.

Pitfall #3: Leading Questions

The things considered polite in everyday conversations may be harmful to the efficiency of a user interview. Trying to help an interviewee with the options can guide them in saying what they don’t really think. A user interview is not the most comfortable situation for the majority of people, and they try to pass it as quickly as possible and at minimum effort. As a result, people tend to agree with anything more or less close to the truth or with a socially-expected choice instead of composing their answer from scratch.

Questions that suggest answer options lead to biased answers. (Large preview)

That’s why it’s better to move one step at a time and build the next question upon the answer to the previous one.

Pitfall #4: Selfish Questions

Idea authors sometimes act like proud parents — they want everyone to admire their child. The downside of such an attitude in user interviews is the unconscious usage of the pronouns “we” or “our.” As a result, users feel as if they are taking an exam and should either adore what they see or maintain neutrality, disguising real complaints.

Possessive pronouns like “our” provoke people to praise the subject of talk instead of sharing honest feedback. (Large preview)

In your interview script, replace possessive pronouns with neutral words like “this site” and “that application” or just call a subject of conversation by the name.

Pro tip: as an interviewer, you can try hiding or understating your job title and relation to the topic.

Pitfall #5: Stacked Questions

There are many reasons why we ask stacked questions. It can be a human desire to be heard, the fear of being interrupted, or worrying that you might forget the next question while listening to the current answer. However, for the interview efficiency, stacked questions are not an option. Interviewees often select the one they are more comfortable to answer to or the one they managed to memorize from the stack. Remembering questions shouldn’t become the interviewee’s burden, so it’s better to ask them one by one. (And maybe the answers are so comprehensive that you won’t need some of the planned questions anymore.)

A stack of questions leads to a messy answer, whereas a sequence of separate questions works much better. (Large preview)

Pitfall #6: Explanation Instead Of A Question

Teams that work together for some time often establish their own language and tend to bring it into the product they are building. But will users understand such words as “dashboard,” “smart update,” “inclusion,” or “trigger”? Explanatory questions put an interviewee into the position of a lexicographer and help to check what sense (if any) they put into brand concepts and expert terminology. For a designer, it gives insights into how the future product — a website, app, or self-service terminal — should speak to people.

Instead of inserting the explanation into the question it’s better to openly ask interviewees what they think this is. (Large preview)

The opposite side of this approach is explaining it yourself and leading people before they have a chance to share their opinions. Think about this: in the interview, you are superior and can put pressure on users making them get your point. But will you always be there for thousands of users to explain how the product works? Probably no. So, it’s more efficient to discover people’s thinking styles and then create self-explanatory solutions rather than create something and push it in interviews.

We’ve just covered six major interviewing mistakes. The next portion of advice will be about making fairly good questions even more powerful and dealing with difficult interview situations.

Pitfall #7: Question Clutter

Open questions are great until you realize there are too many details to figure out. The best method in such a situation is storytelling — describing a recent or the most prominent experience. As a result, an interviewee talks about a real situation and is less inclined to compose a socially desired answer or summarize various cases.

When a topic is broad, it’s better to ask for a full story instead of a series of open questions. (Large preview)

Besides, storytelling gives the freedom to speak about aspects a person considers necessary. Usually, people start with or talk longer about the most crucial experiences.

Pitfall #8: Too General Questions

When you’ve figured out regularity or general attitude, it’s the right moment to ask the interviewee about an example. Recent-experience questions can fill in the gaps, which might have appeared while answering general questions. For an interviewer, it’s another powerful method to check if users aren’t accidentally exaggerating or dropping significant details.

Past-experience questions give more insight into users’ behavior than general questions. (Large preview)

Pitfall #9: Talking About What You Can Observe

When you are lucky enough and interview people in their “natural habitat,” it’s a perfect chance to see their work process with your own eyes. So, if there is an opportunity to ask a user to demonstrate typical actions — offline or online — you’ll gather tons of insights. It’s a chance to learn about users’ habits (including shortcuts and favorite programs), level of computer skills, software environment, and the way of thinking (mental model).

Sometimes it’s better to witness user’s behavior than to listen to its verbal description. (Large preview)

Pitfall #10: Tolerating Vagueness

Abstract nouns and adjectives, for example, “comfort,” “accessibility,” “support,” “smart,” or “user-friendly,” are probably the trickiest words in the language because everyone interprets them differently. When you hear abstract names, that’s not enough to document them as they are. These words require “unboxing” and only then can support design decision-making.

Abstract concepts need unboxing; otherwise, they cannot back up design decision-making. (Large preview)

“Nothing is clear enough” has become my second favorite slogan after the classical UX phrase “It depends.” “Nothing is clear enough” means that you cannot be certain about the meaning if you hardly visualize a scenario from your interviewee’s life. The best way to unbox abstract concepts is by turning them into verbs.

Pitfall #11: Missing Numbers

Generalizations like “all,” “never,” “always,” “nobody,” “often,” or“frequently” are as unclear as abstract nouns and adjectives. But the way to “unbox” generalizations is different — through quantifying. Basically, you ask questions about approximate numbers or proportions. An interviewee, of course, might not provide you statistics, but at least you’ll understand whether the user’s “very frequent” is about “more than a half” or “nearly 20%.” Another example: the same phrase “a lot” can mean “50 per day” for work emails, but it’ll be only “5 per year” for cybersecurity alerts.

Exaggerated or vague characteristics deserve to be quantified in the interview. (Large preview)

Pitfall #12: Undervalued WH-Questions

As a non-native speaker, I remember these questions from the English classes at school. The teacher often asked us to make WH-questions (What? Where? When? Who? How?) so that we could start a conversation and break the awkward silence. Nothing had changed from school times. Now, as a designer, I often use WH-questions as the main interviewing instrument.

WH-questions are great for figuring out time, locations, participants, consequences, and other details. (Large preview)

My favorite question is “why.” For the sake of politeness and a more friendly atmosphere, I conceal it behind the following phrases, “What are you trying to achieve when you…?” or “Can you please explain the reason/value of…?” This is how in pursuit of a root cause you can ask several “whys” in a row without annoying your interviewee.

Summary

The question techniques above are pretty straightforward and might not take into account the nuances of a particular conversation or interviewee. Of course, even the best questions won’t make all the answers automatically objective, but they can make information more reliable and actionable. All in all, it’s always on an interviewer to adjust according to the situation. Here are the three core principles if you are in doubt about particular questions.

Experience holds more truth than a hypothesis.

That’s why it’s recommended to ask about cases from the past and similar examples from other areas of a user’s life.

Let them tell their story; your ideas can wait

The goal of an interview is to explore the truth, not to sell or demonstrate something. If you force an interviewee to support you, it might mean the rest of the people won’t agree either. Also, give preference to clarifying the unknown versus checking hypotheses — for hypotheses, a better method is prototyping and testing.

If you cannot imagine it, you don’t get it

In a series of 1–2-hour user interviews, it’s so easy to get lazy and pretend you understand what you hear. Try challenging interviewee’s statements in your mind, “Did he say the truth? Do I know why she says that? What exactly do they mean telling me about it?”

Recommended Reading

“The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business is a Good Idea when Everyone is Lying to You,” a book by Rob Fitzpatrick.

“User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them,” an article by Kara Pernice for Nielsen Norman Group.

“The 3 Types of User Interviews: Structured, Semi-Structured, and Unstructured,” a video by Maria Rosala for Nielsen Norman Group.

“The Art of the User Interview,” an article by Nick Babich for Springboard.

“How to Conduct User Interviews,” an article by Interaction Design Foundation.

“First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users,” an article by Jakob Nielsen for Nielsen Norman Group.

“Interviewing Users,” an article by Jakob Nielsen for Nielsen Norman Group.

(cc, yk, il)

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source http://www.scpie.org/12-ways-to-improve-user-interview-questions/

[laurelkrugerr]

12 Ways To Improve User Interview Questions

About The Author

Slava is a designer from Ukraine. He works in Berlin as a Designer Manager at ELEKS, a software consultancy, and is a journalist by education. Slava curates … More about Slava Shestopalov …

Right questions don’t simply roll off the tongue, but it’s a handy skill everyone can train. The following pieces of advice will help you to formulate questions that foster reliable answers from your users and clients.

An experienced interviewer takes care of many things: builds hypotheses, selects interviewees, composes invitations, schedules appointments, sets the stage, and, of course, writes an interview script. Any of these preparations can go wrong, but the script failure means all the effort is in vain. So, if you haven’t interviewed people a lot before or you have to delegate it to non-designers, I’d recommend paying attention to high-quality questions, in the first place. Then, there is a chance they’ll smooth out other potential shortcomings.

We’ll talk about 12 kinds of questions explained with examples. The first part includes six frequent mistakes and how to fix them. The second part presents six ways to improve decent questions and take control of difficult situations.

Pitfall #1: Hypothetical Questions

“I don’t care if people will use the new features,” said no budget owner ever. Investing in design and development, people want to make sure money will return. And direct asking, unfortunately, is not an effective way to check it, although it may intuitively seem a great idea. “Let’s go out of the office and ask ‘em!” In my practice, there were a lot of cases when people said they liked a feature but were reluctant to pay for it. So, is there any method to make sure that something not functioning yet will be needed when implemented?

Hypothetical questions put an interviewee into the position of a dreamer, thus don’t provide reliable answers. (Large preview)

I cannot recall anything more relevant than referring to people’s past experiences and behavior in similar situations. If users don’t have a habit of saving articles for later on all the news sites, what is the chance they’ll start doing it on your website? As Jakob Nielsen said, “Users spend most of their time on other sites.”

Pitfall #2: Closed Questions

Closed questions appear from a natural human wish to be approved and gain support. However, in the interviews, they aren’t useful enough. A yes-or-no question doesn’t provoke reserved people to talk and doesn’t help much to reveal their motives and way of thinking.

Open questions help to gather more information than the closed ones. (Large preview)

To be fair, closed questions are not evil. For example, they can serve a handy facilitation technique to make a talkative interviewee stop and turn back to the point. Also, they can help to double-check the information previously received through open questions. But if your goal is to gather as much information as possible, open questions will work better.

Pitfall #3: Leading Questions

The things considered polite in everyday conversations may be harmful to the efficiency of a user interview. Trying to help an interviewee with the options can guide them in saying what they don’t really think. A user interview is not the most comfortable situation for the majority of people, and they try to pass it as quickly as possible and at minimum effort. As a result, people tend to agree with anything more or less close to the truth or with a socially-expected choice instead of composing their answer from scratch.

Questions that suggest answer options lead to biased answers. (Large preview)

That’s why it’s better to move one step at a time and build the next question upon the answer to the previous one.

Pitfall #4: Selfish Questions

Idea authors sometimes act like proud parents — they want everyone to admire their child. The downside of such an attitude in user interviews is the unconscious usage of the pronouns “we” or “our.” As a result, users feel as if they are taking an exam and should either adore what they see or maintain neutrality, disguising real complaints.

Possessive pronouns like “our” provoke people to praise the subject of talk instead of sharing honest feedback. (Large preview)

In your interview script, replace possessive pronouns with neutral words like “this site” and “that application” or just call a subject of conversation by the name.

Pro tip: as an interviewer, you can try hiding or understating your job title and relation to the topic.

Pitfall #5: Stacked Questions

There are many reasons why we ask stacked questions. It can be a human desire to be heard, the fear of being interrupted, or worrying that you might forget the next question while listening to the current answer. However, for the interview efficiency, stacked questions are not an option. Interviewees often select the one they are more comfortable to answer to or the one they managed to memorize from the stack. Remembering questions shouldn’t become the interviewee’s burden, so it’s better to ask them one by one. (And maybe the answers are so comprehensive that you won’t need some of the planned questions anymore.)

A stack of questions leads to a messy answer, whereas a sequence of separate questions works much better. (Large preview)

Pitfall #6: Explanation Instead Of A Question

Teams that work together for some time often establish their own language and tend to bring it into the product they are building. But will users understand such words as “dashboard,” “smart update,” “inclusion,” or “trigger”? Explanatory questions put an interviewee into the position of a lexicographer and help to check what sense (if any) they put into brand concepts and expert terminology. For a designer, it gives insights into how the future product — a website, app, or self-service terminal — should speak to people.

Instead of inserting the explanation into the question it’s better to openly ask interviewees what they think this is. (Large preview)

The opposite side of this approach is explaining it yourself and leading people before they have a chance to share their opinions. Think about this: in the interview, you are superior and can put pressure on users making them get your point. But will you always be there for thousands of users to explain how the product works? Probably no. So, it’s more efficient to discover people’s thinking styles and then create self-explanatory solutions rather than create something and push it in interviews.

We’ve just covered six major interviewing mistakes. The next portion of advice will be about making fairly good questions even more powerful and dealing with difficult interview situations.

Pitfall #7: Question Clutter

Open questions are great until you realize there are too many details to figure out. The best method in such a situation is storytelling — describing a recent or the most prominent experience. As a result, an interviewee talks about a real situation and is less inclined to compose a socially desired answer or summarize various cases.

When a topic is broad, it’s better to ask for a full story instead of a series of open questions. (Large preview)

Besides, storytelling gives the freedom to speak about aspects a person considers necessary. Usually, people start with or talk longer about the most crucial experiences.

Pitfall #8: Too General Questions

When you’ve figured out regularity or general attitude, it’s the right moment to ask the interviewee about an example. Recent-experience questions can fill in the gaps, which might have appeared while answering general questions. For an interviewer, it’s another powerful method to check if users aren’t accidentally exaggerating or dropping significant details.

Past-experience questions give more insight into users’ behavior than general questions. (Large preview)

Pitfall #9: Talking About What You Can Observe

When you are lucky enough and interview people in their “natural habitat,” it’s a perfect chance to see their work process with your own eyes. So, if there is an opportunity to ask a user to demonstrate typical actions — offline or online — you’ll gather tons of insights. It’s a chance to learn about users’ habits (including shortcuts and favorite programs), level of computer skills, software environment, and the way of thinking (mental model).

Sometimes it’s better to witness user’s behavior than to listen to its verbal description. (Large preview)

Pitfall #10: Tolerating Vagueness

Abstract nouns and adjectives, for example, “comfort,” “accessibility,” “support,” “smart,” or “user-friendly,” are probably the trickiest words in the language because everyone interprets them differently. When you hear abstract names, that’s not enough to document them as they are. These words require “unboxing” and only then can support design decision-making.

Abstract concepts need unboxing; otherwise, they cannot back up design decision-making. (Large preview)

“Nothing is clear enough” has become my second favorite slogan after the classical UX phrase “It depends.” “Nothing is clear enough” means that you cannot be certain about the meaning if you hardly visualize a scenario from your interviewee’s life. The best way to unbox abstract concepts is by turning them into verbs.

Pitfall #11: Missing Numbers

Generalizations like “all,” “never,” “always,” “nobody,” “often,” or“frequently” are as unclear as abstract nouns and adjectives. But the way to “unbox” generalizations is different — through quantifying. Basically, you ask questions about approximate numbers or proportions. An interviewee, of course, might not provide you statistics, but at least you’ll understand whether the user’s “very frequent” is about “more than a half” or “nearly 20%.” Another example: the same phrase “a lot” can mean “50 per day” for work emails, but it’ll be only “5 per year” for cybersecurity alerts.

Exaggerated or vague characteristics deserve to be quantified in the interview. (Large preview)

Pitfall #12: Undervalued WH-Questions

As a non-native speaker, I remember these questions from the English classes at school. The teacher often asked us to make WH-questions (What? Where? When? Who? How?) so that we could start a conversation and break the awkward silence. Nothing had changed from school times. Now, as a designer, I often use WH-questions as the main interviewing instrument.

WH-questions are great for figuring out time, locations, participants, consequences, and other details. (Large preview)

My favorite question is “why.” For the sake of politeness and a more friendly atmosphere, I conceal it behind the following phrases, “What are you trying to achieve when you…?” or “Can you please explain the reason/value of…?” This is how in pursuit of a root cause you can ask several “whys” in a row without annoying your interviewee.

Summary

The question techniques above are pretty straightforward and might not take into account the nuances of a particular conversation or interviewee. Of course, even the best questions won’t make all the answers automatically objective, but they can make information more reliable and actionable. All in all, it’s always on an interviewer to adjust according to the situation. Here are the three core principles if you are in doubt about particular questions.

Experience holds more truth than a hypothesis.

That’s why it’s recommended to ask about cases from the past and similar examples from other areas of a user’s life.

Let them tell their story; your ideas can wait

The goal of an interview is to explore the truth, not to sell or demonstrate something. If you force an interviewee to support you, it might mean the rest of the people won’t agree either. Also, give preference to clarifying the unknown versus checking hypotheses — for hypotheses, a better method is prototyping and testing.

If you cannot imagine it, you don’t get it

In a series of 1–2-hour user interviews, it’s so easy to get lazy and pretend you understand what you hear. Try challenging interviewee’s statements in your mind, “Did he say the truth? Do I know why she says that? What exactly do they mean telling me about it?”

Recommended Reading

“The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business is a Good Idea when Everyone is Lying to You,” a book by Rob Fitzpatrick.

“User Interviews: How, When, and Why to Conduct Them,” an article by Kara Pernice for Nielsen Norman Group.

“The 3 Types of User Interviews: Structured, Semi-Structured, and Unstructured,” a video by Maria Rosala for Nielsen Norman Group.

“The Art of the User Interview,” an article by Nick Babich for Springboard.

“How to Conduct User Interviews,” an article by Interaction Design Foundation.

“First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users,” an article by Jakob Nielsen for Nielsen Norman Group.

“Interviewing Users,” an article by Jakob Nielsen for Nielsen Norman Group.

(cc, yk, il)

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source http://www.scpie.org/12-ways-to-improve-user-interview-questions/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/06/12-ways-to-improve-user-interview.html

[kandisfiorillo-blog]

Calling Little one

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[superlinguo]

Linguistics Jobs: Interview with an Internet Linguist

If you’re a regular reader of this blog then Gretchen McCulloch will already be familiar to you as the other half of the Lingthusiasm. While the podcast is something I do alongside an academic job, Gretchen is a full-time pop linguist. She runs the blog All Things Linguistic, has a regular column with Wired and her book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language is out on the 23rd of July. It’s particularly delightful to include Gretchen in the Linguistics Jobs interview series because I started doing these after a chat with Gretchen about how we need more stories about how people use their linguistic skills in different jobs.

What did you study at university?

I did my undergrad at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada where I got a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) with a major in linguistics and a minor in World Language Studies. I'd actually been planning on doing a minor in French and was just filling my electives with other language courses but then they rolled out the World Language Studies minor right before my final year and I already had the right credits for it, so I changed my minor on paper. I thought about this with great care at the time, but the difference has never mattered. 

I then did a Master of Arts in linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, where I still live. I started my blog, All Things Linguistic, while I was in grad school, which was how I got started writing for a general audience. The blog led to my current career more directly than the schooling did, although I couldn't have done either kind of writing without the academic background. The socialization of grad school was very useful as well: learning how to feel comfortable at an academic conference and how to self-manage on a large research/writing project. I also did a ton of public speaking as an extracurricular activity all the way through, which has been incredibly helpful, both directly for giving talks and also indirectly for media, teaching, and the podcast. 

What is your job?

I call myself an internet linguist because I analyze the language of the internet, for the people of the internet. I think linguists have an ethical responsibility to make our work useful to the communities that we serve, and for me that generally looks like producing accessible linguistics resources online and defending internet language in popular media.

When I was writing and editing the book, I had a daily to-do list with the same thing at the top every day: work on the book! But in order to make such a massive task manageable, I broke that down into both effort-based goals (checking off each pomodoro of time spent) and results-based goals (such as rewriting a particular section). Now that I'm working on multiple projects at once rather than one enormous project, I've switched to weekly to-do lists: a given week will generally contain a few things I need to do for the book, a few things for the podcast, a few things for an article I'm writing for Wired or a consulting project, some media calls or meetings, and some general admin. (I also have a weekly section called "fun" because that's an important part of a healthy lifestyle!)

When I'm home, I'm either working from my home office or from a coffeeshop, and Twitter and Slack are kind of my "virtual water cooler" for when I need a dose of social interaction. When I'm travelling, it's generally for a conference where I'm giving a talk and having conversations with people for the entire day, which is pretty much the exact opposite and then I have to make sure I get breaks away from people. I like to keep a certain travel-to-home ratio – enough to keep things exciting without being so much that I'm run off my feet.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

My linguistics training is crucial! It's becoming less and less common for public commentators about language to have zero linguistics background and I think this is a positive trend. I have the background to go directly into academic papers and books in any subfield of linguistics, and I have a deep network of linguists who I've seen give talks or chatted with about their projects over the years – I never know when something I vaguely heard about five years ago is going to turn out to be relevant.  

What I notice is, because I have a linguistics background, I'm comfortable claiming certain things about language on my own authority. When I quote another person in one of my articles, it's because that person has specific expertise – I don't need to find a secondary source to quote for basic background information that any linguist would know or for analyses that draw on general principles of linguistics. Indeed, I'm often a secondary source that journalists without linguistics training go to for quotes. I also see all my articles through a linguist lens, which means that I'm inspired to write about topics that linguists know are interesting but the average person doesn't even realize might exist, and that I can avoid perpetuating the same old myths and misconceptions that often show up in language media.

What was the transition from university to work like for you?

How I got started in my job is somewhat unusual, so I actually ended up writing an extended blog post series about Weird Internet Careers.

Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I wish I'd known more about the breadth of writing styles that were available. The only kind of journalism that I was taught about in school was reporting, where a non-expert goes out with a notebook to interview witnesses and writes an "inverted pyramid" style article about what happened. I didn't know about the "explainer" style of article, which takes a deeper and less time-sensitive dive into why or how something works, until much later, when I was basically already writing them. It turns out that I have very little interest in reporting on current events (and let's face it, there isn't a ton of language news), but I'm always interested in the question of how and why language works, and answering it in ways that are exciting for non-specialists keeps me fired up about the big questions of our field. 

In retrospect, when I was first getting into linguistics, I was reading a lot of science communication about linguistics, but I didn't know that this was the name for the genre or that you can get a whole degree in SciComm (often a masters after doing a bachelors in a specific science). And SciComm as a field is often more focussed on subjects like physics or biology, so I've been using the word LingComm to draw attention to linguistics communication as a subset of science communication. I'd encourage anyone who might be interested in writing for a general audience to follow journalists, editors, and scicommers on twitter to get a sense of what that area can look like.

Any other thoughts or comments?

l also post linguistics job related information at allthingslinguistic.com/jobs, including some interviews and advice posts on specific aspects of explaining linguistics for the general public. In particular, I'd recommend my post Linguistics + X, about finding interesting jobs at the intersection of linguistics and your other interests, and my series on how to do LingComm.   

Previously:

Interview with a Lexicographer

Interview with a Journalist

Interview with a PR Consultant

Interview with an Agency Owner & Executive Editor

Interview with a Freelance Editor, Writer and Trainer

Check out the Linguist Jobs tag for even more interviews