Why UX design needs to teach people about news judgement
by Shane Schick — Dec 2 '13
I was only six years old when American journalist Bill Stewart was shot by National Guard Forces in Nicaragua in 1979, but when you’re surrounded by images of the event it’s not hard to imagine the sense of terror it created.
The story of Stewart, who was reporting on the marching of rebel forces to the capital city of Managua for ABC News when he was captured, is the centerpiece of Movie-Television-News-History by Sarah Charlesworth, an exhibit I stumbled upon during a quick stop at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York two months ago. Though perhaps unintended, it offers a unique illustration of not only what user experience design does, but what it has the potential to do better.
As you might expect, the story of Stewart’s execution was widely reported across the United States, with a grainy photo of the event captured by an ABC News cameraman. Charlesworth’s exhibit takes the front pages of many major daily newspapers the day afterwards, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald. But apart from the photo, the caption and the newspaper’s name and masthead, every other story and picture has been removed. The white space that remains shows, as you walk from one front page to the next, how different newspapers placed the story and how large it ran.
Sarah Charlesworth. Movie-Television-News-History, June 21, 1979 (details). 1979. 27 chromogenic color prints, printed 2010, each approx. 22 x 14″ (55.9 x 35.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art and Committee on Photography Fund. © 2013 Estate of Sarah Charlesworth
Neither Charlesworth nor MOMA uses this term in the text that accompanies the work, but the journalist in me recognized instantly that what was on display here was something we in the media call “news judgement.” This is the notion that the role of editors is to make conscious choices about the importance of each story and the way it is told — choices which factor into the placement of photos and captions in newspapers. Among seasoned news veterans, there is a deep sense of responsibility in honing and cultivating news judgement that serves the reader in ways that respects their intelligence and reflects the values of their communities.
You could say that user experience (UX) design is not unlike news judgement, in that the placement of icons in an interface, for example, are important to help people navigate through a piece of software or an app. I think it’s more complicated than that, however. One of the biggest shifts in my profession has been what I will call a democratization of news judgement. In other words, editors are no longer the only arbiters of how a story like Stewart’s would be spread to the mainstream public. Everyday people can blog, tweet, post updates on Facebook or upload videos on YouTube that may contradict or offer a counter-argument to any news judgements made by “established” media organizations.
In newspapers, though, it takes time to learn the impact of running a photo, a story or a headline at the top of the page or the bottom, making it huge or treating it in a more minimalist way. In our more participatory era of content creation, individual people often lack the large teams of big media companies to discuss these things. This is why citizen journalism or user-generated content is sometimes treated with wariness, skepticism and contempt.
The job of UX designers often involves creating the tools or platforms on which people can create or distribute content almost anywhere, to almost anyone. What responsibility do UX professionals have to not only make this easy and pleasant, but to bring users greater awareness about the kind of news judgements they all now get to make? Can they show, as Charlesworth does, how much these kinds of choices matter? Thanks to the Internet, there is more white space to be filled than ever before. Hopefully we can one day thank UX design for making sure it is filled in ways that best educate, inform and inspire.
