What audience interviews tell you that analytics can't
People rarely tell you what they need. They tell you where they are struggling, and the reading is yours to do.
Analytics tell you how many people opened the newsletter or turned up to the event. They don't tell you why, or whether what you made was any use once people had it. That gap is where service design starts: getting close enough to people's everyday realities to build something they can actually depend on.
A new column at the Reynolds Journalism Institute works through how to close that gap with interviews. Who to talk to, how to ask, and why the question you say out loud is often not the question you want answered.
The first piece includes a long conversation with Nick Parish, who publishes Current Flow State for people building a fly fishing practice. He had built his intro classes around the moment students catch a fish.
When he went back and interviewed them, most named something else: the moment they learned to cast properly, got the line out straight and felt the rod load. That reset what he publishes and what he programmes.
Interviews are also how you find out what not to build. Readers asked Nick for community, and he concluded he would be more useful pointing them toward the fly fishing communities that already exist than starting one of his own.
Read the piece here.
Thank you, Kat!