Steve Portigal on Writing, part 1

The Informed Life

Steve Portigal is an independent user research consultant. He is the author of Interviewing Users and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries. Steve was previously on the show last year, talking about research skills. This conversation is a bit different: both of us have written new books, and we thought it’d be fun to compare notes about the process. We decided to split our conversation into two parts. This episode focuses on the motivations for writing, and the second part will focus on processes.

Show Notes

• Steve Portigal
• Steve Portigal - LinkedIn
• Portigal Consulting
• Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (2nd edition) by Steve Portigal
• Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories by Steve Portigal
• The Informed Life ep. 92 - Steve Portigal on Research Skills
• Louis Rosenfeld
• Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango
• Blogger
• The Informed Life ep. 118 — Maggie Appleton on Digital Gardening
• Maggie Appleton
• About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design (4th edition) by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher Noessel
• Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick
• Obsidian
• Building a Personal Knowledge Garden (Information Architecture Conference 2022 workshop)

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Chapters

1. Steve Portigal on Writing, part 1 (00:00:00)

2. About Steve (00:01:28)

3. The New Edition of 'Interviewing Users' (00:02:41)

4. Writing the First Edition (00:04:39)

5. The Evolution of Writing and Publishing (00:09:40)

6. How We Got Into Writing (00:12:14)

7. Writing Books for a Changing World (00:19:35)

8. Writing a Second Edition (00:29:15)

9. Closing (00:36:26)