The first rule of good listening: try to disprove your assumptions

🍂 Hello from the oddly cool East Coast, where it’s 65 degrees F in August. If you’re here, welcome to “Fake Fall,” a brief moment in time when cool air wafts in from Ontario and Manitoba.
Issue #147: gradual evolution, writing for humans, and how to make a good first impression
By Harris Sockel

A few years ago, a big part of my job was interviewing writers. We were (and are!) curious about why some people decide to open up a blank piece of digital paper and share their thoughts with the world.

Every day, I Zoomed with someone new.

“Why do you write on Medium? What bugs you about it? If you had a magic wand…”

I took notes. I shared them with my team. I pulled out patterns. A lot of what I heard confirmed what I already thought: People love the simplicity of Medium. They write to connect with people they care about. Sometimes they’re confused about how and whether to earn money.

There were a few surprises (like one writer who arrived on Medium as part of a UX course before pivoting to publishing original watercolor paintings), but overall I can’t say we learned anything we hadn’t already suspected — possibly because we weren’t trying very hard to disprove our assumptions.

Judd Antin, a business lecturer at U.C. Berkeley and a former design lead at Airbnb and Facebook, recently published a wake-up call on Medium about talking to your customers, and I wish I’d seen it that summer. “User research,” as it’s called in the biz, is one of the most popular ways companies pressure-test their ideas before building them — but Antin believes most of us could do it a little better. A few lessons stand out to me, all of which apply to listening generally:

• Approach a conversation as an exercise in bubble bursting. Look for evidence that disproves your assumptions about your customers instead of confirming them.
• Don’t get distracted by loud people. It’s so easy to only talk to your loudest and most disgruntled customers. Instead, seek out the quiet ones.
• Listen and then act. If a customer tells you a bunch of things they hate about your product and you nod vehemently but then do nothing, that’s almost worse than never having listened at all. No one will admit this, but lots of tech leaders interview customers as cover for what they’re going to do anyway. Instead, listen and then act.

Elsewhere on Medium…

• Our very own Zouhair Mahieddine, Staff iOS Engineer at Medium, on how to work with old code: Instead of jumping into a comprehensive rewrite, understand the code you’re working with first. Evolve in small steps, not huge leaps (which applies to so many big problems).
• Here’s a story that struck a nerve on Medium (267 comments and counting!): Veteran blogger and poet Carmellita explains how SEO-optimized writing makes everyone sound the same — it makes us write for skimmability instead of nuance, humanity, and specificity.

👋 Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about saying hello

Every “hi” is a first impression. To do it well, lead with curiosity instead of apathy, mistrust, or resignation.

Quiz: Zoom In

Below is a zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly will win a free Medium membership.

Yesterday’s winner is… The AuDHD Philosopher for correctly spotting a cheese wheel in “Kidfluencers: The Ethics of Marketing My Child.”

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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