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Originally posted on Ghost as Weeknote, July 19: On international English, informational interviews, and a classroom-ful of death.

Work things

1. On not listening to users

There’s a somewhat funny transition that a person goes through when learning “product thinking” or “product insights”. It’s that point when “Listen to users” morphs into “Yes, but, don’t just listen to users”.

The more critical thing is understanding the “why?”, “what for?” and “what happens then?“, and not (just) listening to the face value user answers.

2. Global English

I thought I did the smart thing and used transcripts and live customer input to inform the IA (labels, drop-down content)/ UX writing of an interface I worked on.

But. A userbase can shift over two years — from predominantly North American, to increasingly global / European.

• Two takeaways:
  • a) Highly diverse audiences for Saas products would mean the need for broadly understood, but clear language.
  • b) Being data-driven is great, but for technical SaaS in a highly non-standardized industry, it’s impossible to expect 100% intuition, for copy. What you can hope for is some form of Pareto (20% that has 80% impact) + the need for clear affordances and onboarding.

Life things

• Informational interviews are pretty awesome. Such a great way to learn about people, and how they got to where they are. Such as: what people value (e.g. team + manager, financial growth), and having the confidence to learn new skills, and shape their role. Thank you so much, A., L., A., and R.
• Started reading Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless. Timothy Snyder’s intro (for this 2020 version) already stopped me in my tracks, and made me reflect on…how eerily aligned 1970’s Czechoslovakia is to the present-day (half a century later).

Truth is unpredictable, for each of us is moved in our own way. Something is true only if it brings you, once in a while, to disturb others… You do not know whom your action will touch, but “any genuinely meaningful point of departure in an individual’s life usually has an element of universality in it”.

Timothy Snyder, discussing Vaclav Havel’s writing, in the introduction of The Power of the Powerless

It was such an information-filled week, I almost forgot to write about one of the highlights:

• Vancouver Hour held its first event, where I got to learn about how BIA’s (Business Improvement Associations) work, which I really wanted to see because I love how active BIAs are (at least the ones I’ve seen), and it’s not something I’ve seen in the Philippines/ before.
  And, more specifically, I wanted to see Landon Hoyt speak about the Hastings Crossing BIA again. Because I saw him speak at a previous event (more community research-focused), and I loved how he answered this one Q&A question, where you could see how much he cares about growing and managing businesses while caring for people’s welfare in the area.
  I may need to write about what I learned from the Vancouver Hour event separately, because I learned so much from this event alone.