Crunchberry Project

flickr/darth4life83

..without me telling you what I want to know.   One of the challenges in testing the comment structures we have been designing and developing is getting valuable and unbiased feedback from our test panel.  Since we are not in Cedar Rapids and cannot conduct the tests in person, we have been using CoPilot, a program that allows us to see the desktop of the person using our demo.   It is helpful to be able to see how the tester is interacting with our site and to see any glitches that arise for them.   It is not perfect, but it is better than being blind to what the tester is experiencing. 

We have been arranging times to chat with the people from our test panel and observe how they use the site.  Once they have poked around, we ask them questions about their experience.  We have improved our technique since the first week of testing, but it is still tricky to ask questions that are not leading.  We do have specific questions we want answered, but we would are also looking for ideas that we may not have considered during design or development – we want them to tell us whatever comes to their mind while using the site.  We have gotten some good feedbackand have been incorporating suggestions into the revised versions of our demos.

Another lesson we have learned is that it is best to somehow indicate to the test panel that we (the people on the phone with them) did not develop the site they are testing.  We don’t want them to hold back on telling us things they don’t like or  to be reluctant to give us their honest opinion.  As much as we appreciate positive feedback, it is really helpful to know what they don’t like or understand so we can try to make it better while we still have time.

We’ve been writing this blog since the project started.  For the first few weeks we wrote about the theory of the project, since that was what we were struggling with - the major decisions of which task to tackle, which features to include, and which to cut.  

Those were the heady days of philosophical discussions about Journalism and Conversations and Democracy and there was much to blog.  

Then came the era of the research, wherein the consumer insights team wrote about their findings, and the industry researchers dug through the host of products already in existence, and the team gleaned many new answers that provided course corrections for the project.  Since then we’ve blogged about some of our industry research discoveries.

The act of blogging served as a catharsis.  It was the cleansing act of articulating the problems we were combating.  It helped us organize, provided objectivity and some of the input we’ve received from comments has been invaluable.

Happy programmers write happy code. by Stuart Tiffen

But after much hand-wringing and painful decisions suddenly, overnight we were in full-on development mode.  Since now our day-to-day grind consists of tackling innumerable design and development obstacles, with some research and now final report and presentation preparation thrown in, such pursuits do not always make for interesting blog posts.

And so, I ask you, our loyal reader(s), what is it that you would like to know about the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma that we call the 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?

As noted in an earlier post, we developed personas to guide our development and to serve as users in our product mock-ups.  When the design team creates a template for what the commenting structure might look like and how it might function, they use the Bristol, Willow and Track personas to post example comments. 

The basic characteristics of our personas were hashed out a few weeks ago and we have been adjusting and building upon them ever since.  They now have histories, families, hobbies, friends, media interests and, of course, facebook profiles.  This enhanced familiarity with Bristol, facilitates the design team’s creation of comments she might make on a particular article (e.g. what she would say, how she would like to say it, and who she would want to say it to), which ultimately helps us create something geared to those needs. 

These Web sites have good examples of what a bio/persona should look like:
Chopsticker   Agile Modeling

p.s.  We think Bristol-berrywould dress up as Sarah Palin for Halloween.

(Click here to read the rest of this entry)

Image source: adactio/flickr

Starting out down this road, our guiding question was, “what can we create that will facilitate connections between people in Cedar Rapids, preferably through local news.” To encourage participation and connections between users, we have to think about what will compel people to contribute, not just consume. We are looking to the lessons learned by successful social networking sites to guide us through our research and development.

For the sake of our sanity, and in the interest of completing something by the end of our quarter, we narrowed our focus and chose a specific subset of people in Cedar Rapids to keep in mind while developing our product.

We thought it would be a good idea to aim for Gazette readers who are relatively tech savvy and use the Internet regularly — one less hurdle to overcome in getting people to use what we create. It looks like this hurdle is getting smaller.

According to research by Forrester Research Inc.,

“Looking at the US data, the big news in 2008 is that, not unexpectedly, social technology participation has grown rapidly. Inactives — people untouched by social technologies — have shriveled from 44% down to 25% of the online population. Spectators — those who read, watch, or consumer social content — have ballooned from 48% to 69%. If you think social technology is about to become a universal phenomenon, we just handed you a nice little bundle of evidence.”

We chose to focus on connecting 20-34 years olds because research indicates they are more comfortable communicating online and more likely to read news online than pick up a newspaper.

It is encouraging to see research that suggests what we develop will be useful to more and more people if we incorporate social networking tools to break down the barriers that are keeping readers from contributing.

It is not only that more young people are using social networking tools, but that ,“Social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content.”

Go to groundswell.com for more information and to learn more about the classifications used in the graphs and to see and illustration of the Social Technographics Ladder that breaks down different groups and methods of online participation.

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?).

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

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.