Crunchberry Project

After a subsequent round of surveys, Team Crunchberry gathered new data on Internet usage rates from our user panel.  From the survey we’ve gleaned that participation intimidation, one of the barriers we’d earlier identified, is not a significant factor for the Cedar Rapids area.  We also eliminated the barrier “Comments lack are not valuable” choosing instead to investigate “Comments are not believable,” as it is a subset of the former, and since it is the more measurable problem to solve.

On Tuesday we finally hammered out a narrowed-down list of super-features and began actual development.  Many hours were spent agonizing over eliminating some features and barriers from our wish list that we wouldn’t have the time to implement, but what we’ve ended up with is a (still over-broad) list of super-features and subordinate features that mitigate many of the barriers to strengthening communities of our target demographic in Cedar Rapids.

The subordinate features on the image above only represent a tiny portion of the overall list of features we’ve written, and that list continues to evolve as the iterative development process gets underway.

Due to time constraints we will not be able to accomplish everything on our narrowed super-feature list.  We are not ruling any of this list out entirely, but to get the ball rolling we are beginning to develop two super-features:  Comment Structure and Facebook integration.

Running along Cedar Lake in Cedar Rapids, IA / Image by CR Artist

As described in the previous post, we are a group of journalism students looking for ways to engage the Cedar Rapids community through local news.

One of our first steps in this process is to pinpoint a target audience. After we decide who we are trying to serve, we will need to figure out what their interests are and use that information to develop a product that better serves their needs.

Back to step one – Who are we trying to reach?

The Cedar Rapids Gazette has conducted market research into the online habits, media attitudes and news interests of their audience, which will help us to narrow our focus to a particular segment of the population.

Using the information they provided and reports by the Pew Internet and American Life Project we have decided to concentrate our efforts on reaching young adults (age 20-34) who may be starting families, careers and/or putting down roots in the Cedar Rapids area. According to the data, this group is already technology savvy and uses the internet for both news and entertainment. We have also found BetterTogether.org to be a helpful resource.

To get to know them better, we will be sending out surveys and talking with people in this group to get a better idea of their online habits, news sources, local interests, community involvement and ideas for improving the Gazette’s Web site to meet their particular needs.

We are in the early stages of information gathering, and what we will eventually develop is still being shaped by the feedback we hope to get from the Cedar Rapids community.