Torrey Podmajersky: Aligning Language and Meaning in Complex Systems – Episode 39

Torrey Podmajersky Torrey Podmajersky is uniquely well-prepared to help digital teams align on language and meaning. Her father's interest in philosophy led her to an early intellectual journey into semantics, and her work as a UX writer at companies like Google and Microsoft has attuned her to the need to discover and convey precise meaning in complex digital experiences. This helps her span the "semantic gaps" that emerge when diverse groups of stakeholders use different language to describe similar things. We talked about: her work as president at her consultancy, Catbird Content, and as the author of two UX books how her father's interest in philosophy and semantics led her to believe that everyone routinely thinks about what things mean and how to represent meaning the role of community and collaboration in crafting the language that conveys meaning how the educational concept of "prelecting" facilitates crafting shared-meaning experiences the importance of understanding how to discern and account for implicit knowledge in experience design how she identifies "semantic gaps" in the language that various stakeholders use her discovery, and immediate fascination with, the Cyc project and its impact on her semantic design work her take on the fundamental differences between how humans and LLMs create content Torrey's bio Torrey Podmajersky helps teams solve business and customer problems using UX and content at Google, OfferUp, Microsoft, and clients of Catbird Content. She wrote Strategic Writing for UX, is co-authoring UX Skills for Business Strategy, hosts the Button Conference, and teaches content, UX, and other topics at schools and conferences in North America and Europe. Connect with Torrey online LinkedIn Catbird Content (newsletter sign-up) Torrey's Books Strategic Writing for UX UX Skills for Business Strategy Resources mentioned in this interview Cyc project Button Conference UX Methods.org Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/0GLpW9gAsG0 Podcast intro transcript This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 39. Finding the right language to describe how groups of people agree on the meaning of the things they're working with is hard. Torrey Podmajersky is uniquely well-prepared to meet this challenge. She was raised in a home where where it was common to have philosophical discussions about semantics over dinner. More recently, she's worked as a designer at tech companies like Google, collaborating with diverse teams to find and share the meaning in complex systems. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 39 of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Torrey Podmajersky. I've known Torrey for years from the content world, the UX design and content design and UX writing and all those worlds. I used to live very closer to her office in Seattle, but Torrey's currently the president at Catbird Content, her consultancy, and she's guest faculty at the University of Washington iSchool. She does all kinds of interesting stuff, very accomplished author. So welcome Torrey. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to and where all the books are at these days. Torrey: Thanks so much, Larry. I am up to my neck in finishing the books right now. So one just came out the second edition of Strategic Writing for UX that has a brand new chapter on building LLMs into products and updates throughout, of course since it came out six years ago. But I'm also working on the final manuscript with twoTorrey Podmajersky co-authors for UX Skills for Business Strategy. That'll be a wine pairing guide, a deep reference book that connects the business impact that you might want to make, whether you're a UX pro or a PM or a knowledge graph enthusiast working somewhere in product and connecting it to the UX skills you mi...