Activities this week

This week we conducted a session of sharing some insights from a study we read about the experience of published content. We were battling with thoughts about what readers actually want that journalism today is lacking? What experience is lacking? On the other hand, what do journalists need to create better content? This also links back to some findings that came up when we did contextual interviews with The Daily, a publication at UW. An interesting thought came up during this conversation this week:

“what if we put a journalist and a reader together and ask them to discuss their thoughts on consumption and creation of publishing content?”

This triggered a realization that a focus group might be a good approach to answer some of these questions, give us a push in the right direction and see both sides of the story. We took this up as our next and final big research method before moving on to ideation. We plan to recruit three journalists (online only medium, traditional, professional blogger), an editor if we can access someone and three readers (a paid subscriber, free online news readers, and a blogger). We have identified a few potential participants that fall under these categories, our next task is to approach them and schedule the focus group. We plan to keep this focus group conversational with a facilitator initiating conversation. Below are examples of a few potential questions we have started planning out for this.

• What are your perceptions of your readers? What value do you think they get from your content? What value should you receive? (to journalists)
• How, if ever, do you interact with your readers? (to journalists)
• How, if ever, do you interact with the writer? (to readers)
• How do you decide on your pieces? Is this dictated by what readers want, or what your editors plan? (to journalists)
• How do you feel about that? (to readers)
• What do you think about digital vs. print? Give us examples (to both)
• What do you feel would be helpful in creating/consuming? What do you want? (to both)
• Initiate conversation with storyboards, example videos or some prototype.

As we started to plan this early user evaluation, we identified that a major challenge with this kind of a project is getting across such an experiential concept to the users at an early stage where it does not exist. Initially we thought of using storyboards of early concepts, however, modes of communication like storyboards might turn out to be too static for the kind of experience we want to convey. The challenge is finding an appropriate way to showcase the possibilities enabled by this technology to the users to get early feedback on desirability. This could mean showing examples of existing technologies to show what is possible, could be smoke and mirror prototypes or a video prototype. We have yet to plan that part. Conducting this focus group is a massive ambitious effort given our limited time frame, however, we believe it is one that will give us tremendous insight into the concept of collaborative co-creation between creators and consumers of content. We plan to conduct this mid-week next week. Today we went through the process of planning our recruitment of participants and setup for focus group.

Apart from this we have a few upcoming expert interviews in the next week and an observation activity planned.

Other Thoughts We Have been Working on This Week

The following are a summary of internal conversations as well as our weekly feedback session with our capstone class coordinators.

The problem with digital content right now is that it is not a conversation. It is very linear. What if consumption of content can be made into more of an interaction? What if we create a platform for collaborative co-creation and understanding of news? Co-creation of content between creators (journalists, bloggers, editors) and consumers of content could lead to a conversation which would make journalism much more richer.

Thinking about journalism these days, something that keeps coming up is this notion of quality. What does quality mean exactly to people? Is quality the traditional perspective of journalism, i.e. ‘integrity’? Or is it becoming more about ‘understanding’? How does the experience of how the content is presented and consumed make the understanding of news better?

These were just some thoughts that we want to further continue to think about as we move into ideation. As we start thinking about how to bridge our research into ideation, a good approach seems to be to develop our hypothesis on some of these overarching notions that we have been thinking about and come up with a few ideas for each. In the next stages, we want to get into an intense phase of starting to build out ideas and test them out in various fidelity levels. The focus group will be a good final front-end research activity to push things forward into this upcoming phase.