Crunchberry Project

I judge books by their covers. Similarly, I judge websites by their homepages. If you don’t impress me, I will likely leave your site within minutes. 

Research has shown I’m not alone in this. While we all judge homepages by our own set of standards, the fact remains, we judge. This is not good news for someone (me) trying to design a homepage. In fact, it’s downright terrifying. 

The obvious first option was to copy the standard norms for online news sites. Think: USAToday.com, NYTimes.com and CNN.com. There is nothing wrong with these models, to be sure, but as we are building a somewhat experimental site, we wanted to be, well, experimental. And the truth of the matter is we will likely not have enough content each day to fill an entire news site, nor the development time to build it. 

What we want from this site is a place to best showcase what we have created: the comment structures we have built and the Facebook Connect integration we have developed. One of our professors, Jeremy Gilbert, put it best. This site should be like the best art galleries – display the work without getting in the way.

We decided to pursue a news feed model. What we think is the quickest and easiest way to get readers into the stories and experimenting with our designs. Think: New York Times River (with a little more design), meets Digg (without ratings).

New York Times River on a mobile platform. dsearls/flickr

 You see, we are designing a site for the Facebook generation. These people use Digg, Reddit and Twitter. They use sites like this. They get it. They don’t necessarily need the pretty, the big photos, the fancy layout (especially for our testing purposes) they need the stories. 

So while this site might not agree with the tastes of everyone, hopefully it will help us reach our target audience, 20 to 35 year olds living in Cedar Rapids, so they will be able to test out what we have built for them.

After all, if you build it, they will come, right?

Worlds Fair 1893

After four weeks deep in designing and developing new ways to approach commenting and conversation around news, we have an interesting challenge. How do we show off our work? As we have discussed in previous posts, our goal for this project was to look at ways to improve the quality of conversation on news Web sites. We’ve developed three ways to facilitate conversation - Question & Answer style comments, short format, tweet-like comments, and Letters to the Editor. And we have built all of these systems to integrate with Facebook. Over the next couple weeks we will focus on polish, and more importantly, developing a way to demonstrate what we’ve built.

There are a few ways that we can show off. We could build a news Web site, host content and attract viewers to participate in our community. We could try to export our app by making it embeddable into other websites. We could release the code and let others use it in existing sites.

We will definitely release the source code, but we can’t rely on others to show off our stuff. So in light of our time constraints, we have decided to build a simple news website. Something with local Cedar Rapids news that will allow interested people interact and discuss the news with other readers and Facebook friends.

So what should our local news website look like? How should we apply our commenting systems? Short-format twitter comments on entertainment and sport stories? Letters to the Editor for hot button issues? Questions and Answers on investigative stories? Some combination of the three on all stories?

These are some of the questions we would like to answer this week.

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.

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