Crunchberry Project

photo by ashe-villain/flickr

Lately we’ve had all sorts of posts about various bits of industry research that we’ve been doing on sites like MonroeTalks, Salon.com’s letters to the editor model, Plurk and personas, but we haven’t taken the time to actually give an update about where we are in the process of this project.  

Well, here it is folks:  We are in the midst of our fifth development iteration.  We have so far successfully designed, developed and are testing the first of our comment structures - Q&A.  Ryan and Brian, our overworked dev team, made an solid product in minimum time.  

We have also designed our second comment structure - Short Format - and that is being developed during the current iteration and we’ll be testing next week.  

The design team, which consists of Kayla and I, augmented by Josh and Angela is working hard on the Letters to the Editor comment structure, as well as ratings structures to be reverse engineered into Q&A and Short Format, all of which are to be developed next week.  

Through each of the last three iterations we’ve been plumbing the depths of Facebook integration, asking how much is too much, how little is not enough and how should it all look?

Image source: Summer Luu/flickr

In our quest to learn more about the needs and interests of the people living in Cedar Rapids we developed an online survey.  The advantage of using that method was that we could reach a larger pool of people in a short amount of time.  The disadvantage was that we couldn’t really ask many opened-ended questions or follow-up on interesting answers.  To address this, we called a subset of the people who took our online survey and asked them some of the following questions

• What sorts of things do you do for fun?
• What do you do on a weekday evening?
• What do you do on a typical weekend?
• What area do you live in and why did you choose to live there?
• What do you like about your area?
• What don’t you like about it?
• What would make eastern Iowa a better place to live?
• Where do you get your news?
• Do you feel that the news sources you use satisfy your needs?
• What issues are important to you?
• What web sites do you use frequently?
• Do you use any web sites to find information about Cedar Rapids or eastern Iowa?
• Do you discuss news on the Internet, over chat, commenting on stories, or in online forums?

It turned out to be quite useful and allowed us to get a better sense of what the people we spoke with were like.  We may end up using this information to develop user personas, a collection of the interests and behaviors of a real group of potential users of our product. The personas will be created using data we collected from our interviews and surveys and will help give a human face to the people we are developing for.  Follow this link for more on the origin of personas.

The team spent Friday morning coalescing ideas and understanding about eastern Iowans and what we might be able to do for them. Thursday we sent out email surveys and called people to ask questions. Friday we discussed our interviews and identified some information needs that eastern Iowans might have:

• Child rearing - online forums, daycare
• Family Activities & events
• Housekeeping/housework
• Family dinner & nutrition
• Crime news & enforcement & neighborhood watch
• Baby news & family news
• Local business & jobs
• Farmers market
• Grown-up things to do
• Local news
• Keeping in touch with friends, family
• Night life
• Making news gathering easier: most news-bang for time-buck

A favorite of mine is the need to make news gathering easier.

A new study from Medill’s Media Management Center called ” What It Takes To Be A Web Favorite” shows that people can be overwhelmed by the volume of stuff on a newspaper’s website. They see a enormous list of headlines in multiple columns on a web page, and get turned off. Another study from the AP called “A New Model for News” shows that readers really want depth in the news they consume, but often don’t get that in their daily reading. People will go from web site to web site looking for stories that provide more information and read the same story or similar stories over and over.

People don’t have a lot of time to read the news, but want in-depth news and are having trouble getting it. This issue was echoed by a few people we interviewed, and our team members recognized that this is something that they personally deal with.

It’s the usability, stupid.

UPDATE:
Let me talk a little about how we came to pick these topics.

We did a limited survey of people who volunteered to participate, and called them to ask some more in-depth questions. A few people were stay-at-home moms. Around half of the people had kids of some age. The rest didn’t. We then threw ideas around in a few rounds to come up with a list of things that jived with the activities and interests of the people we talked to and received survey responses from.

It’s certainly not exhaustive and definately rushed.

We have completed our online survey!  It is just one of the tools we’re harnessing as we attempt to determine the greatest needs in the Cedar Rapids, IA community.

The art of online community cartography

So, if you live in eastern Iowa, or if you do not, but consider yourself remarkably intuitive, please help out the team by filling out this brief online survey.

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB228CEHKB6UM

Sturm und Drang, or Storm and Stress, was a literary, musical and artistic movement of emotional expression reacting to the occasionally oppressive rational restrictions of the Enlightenment during the late 18th century.

As Team Crunchberry tackles innovative approaches to building stronger bonds and networks within the community of Cedar Rapids, we too must consider breaking from the past.  We must see both the forest and the trees; the macro- and microcosm.  The task can seem Herculean when viewed at a distance and so we have spent some time gaining perspective.

Shipwreck, 1759

Aiding us to do so today was social media specialist Dan Pacheco, who has worked on various projects including the Bakersfield Californian and Printcasting (see team member Brian Boyer’s blog post on the subject).  Pacheco discussed social networking as it fulfilled the majority of the tiers within Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, and the importance of defining users as content.

Lisa Williams, of placeblogger and h2otown.info, also spoke to the team today, covering subjects including the necessity of regarding a newspaper as an application and the pitfalls of not really knowing what an audience really wants until you put it out there.

The team is approaching a challenge of this magnitude by deconstructing it, where possible, into more manageable chunks.  Today, the team established the over-arching goals we wish to attain and the elite task force known as “Consumer Insights” put the finishing touches on a survey which we’ll be using to gain as much insight into our chosen demographic as possible.

So we shall plunge on, thinking in new directions and attempting to free ourselves from potentially restrictive pre-existing models.