Crunchberry Project

In response to Kayla’s post the other day, we were called out for not getting real enough. Aron’s right. In the rush to start building, we got ahead of ourselves. Team Crunchberry needs a mantra.

As the folks at 37signals put it in their superb book Getting Real, we’ve got to:

Explicitly define the one-point vision for your app

What does your app stand for? What’s it really all about? Before you start designing or coding anything you need to know the purpose of your product — the vision. Think big. Why does it exist? What makes it different than other similar products?

So! What is it we’re doing?

First, as you’ve already heard, we’re experimenting with the format of conversations around news. By changing the shape of comments, we hope to improve their quality — by guiding the conversation and by making it easier to participate.

Second, we’re experimenting with the possibilities of Facebook Connect, a very neat offering from Facebook that will launch in the upcoming weeks. The idea is this: instead of having a login on our site, Facebook users can login seamlessly with a button click.

Why could we want to do this? Besides lowering the mental overhead of forcing a user into signing up for yet another account, we’ll be able to play with real, established social networks. (And without expecting folks to set up a friends list on a site that none of my friends use!)

For instance, when a user makes a comment, we’ll push it to their Facebook feed. Will you be more likely to comment if you know your friends will see what you have to say? Will you be less likely to act like a jackass? We’re hoping so.

The Big Idea by luckyjimmy

So! What’s the Big Idea?

I’ll be sure to bring up our lack of mantra as an issue at our iteration review tomorrow afternoon, bur I’ll try and start off the conversation with a few whacks at it…

Let people speak where they’ll be heard.

Don’t be a jackass, your friends are watching.

Or maybe:

Conversations need structure and an audience.

Image source: bending light/flickr

In an earlier posting I wrote about creating and using personas to guide us through our development process by helping us keep potential users in the front of our minds.  Personas give us something tangible to reference when we are brainstorming or making decisions, so we don’t get carried away with ideas that we might think are awesome, but might not be useful or relevant to our task.

We began by collecting data, through surveys and phone calls, to get information about who the users of our product are:  age, marital status, jobs, children, hobbies, computer use, Internet use, interests, etc.  We also asked them what they thought about communicating online and how often they used social networking sites. 

We put all of this together and developed six personas, which we then narrowed down to three.  We chose the personas that best represented potential users and were most distinct from one another.

This does not necessarily represent the final version of our personas.  As with all other aspects of this project, we will adjust them as we learn more.  The personas do not represent all of the potential users of our product, nor are they intended to.  Neither are they based on any single person we spoke with or the member of the Palin family whose name we used.

They help us put all the information we gathered into a person we can measure ideas against (Would “Bristol” use this tool?).

The team made a lot of progress this week. We chose a direction for the project and general idea of the problem we want to solve. After we made the decision Wednesday, we had a lot of work to really flesh out the problem we decided to address.

We sat down and developed an extensive list of potential barriers that might prevent readers and users from using a local news website like gazetteonline.com. Our consumer insights team began developing personas based on the surveys and interviews from people in cedar rapids and other consumer research. We then applied our list of barriers and personal perceptions to our personas, giving each one a personality.

We came up with around 25 personal barriers or feelings and narrowed our focus to these five:

• Lack of interest in communication with strangers
• Participation is intimidating
• No pay-off or gratification from participation
• Don’t think comments or participation from others is valuable
• Don’t think comments or participation from others is believable

We came to these five based on what we personally thought would be interesting to address. In addition to picking our faves we also created a new survey for our volunteers in eastern Iowa in order to find out what barriers to participation and use of local news that they might experience. We are still waiting on the results from the survey.

We intend to cut these five down and prioritize them based on survey feedback. Hopefully we end up with two or three high level problems to specifically address with the software we build.

We have a lot of ideas on how to address the all problems we identified, some come from our Pie Social idea, but other good ones came out of thinking about these specific barriers and how they might affect our users. We have some work to do on them before we have something to show.

Stay tuned for a post about the personas!