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.

We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. Luckily, we didn’t have to. 

There are many sites out there that let users create profiles—but how many social networks and profiles can one person maintain? We decided not to do what someone else is already doing well, and instead utilize the social networking power that is Facebook, or rather, the ability to relate news to your social network using Facebook Connect.

From the Facebook developers blog: “Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.”

This week I am busy designing a system for how comments a user makes on our site will appear on their Facebook profile. Again, not reinventing the wheel here. The Facebook developers wiki makes it pretty clear what the accepted norms are. 

The system I am designing for The Gazette Online this week is very similar to the entertainment celebrity news and gossip site, The Insider. The Insider was one of the first sites to integrate with the Facebook Connect system. Users can choose to add comments they make on The Insider to their Facebook profile wall feed in either a one line, short or full format. 

The good news is that if Facebook approves our implementation of Facebook Connect, the Gazette would likely be one of the first news sites to use the system. But that is a big IF. Facebook has said Connect will roll out November 30, but it’s anyone’s guess if they will hit that deadline, who they will approve and how it will be decided. All we can do is wait, design, develop and hope that the brains behind Facebook Connect like what they see.

Crunchberry Team's very first Iteration Meeting!

We’ve wrapped up our first week of design, research and coding. In keeping with our agile project plans, the development team (Brian and I) will work one week behind the design team (Kayla and Stuart). The design team spent the last week putting together features and mock-ups which the dev team will be building in software this coming week.

Since the design team hasn’t had time to put anything together for last week, the dev team built a simple CMS and put together a proof of concept for Facebook Connect. Using Django and pluggables we were able to whip up a basic dynamic news site, plain-jane comments and account registration in a day. It ain’t much to look at yet, but it will give us a starting point to build from as we get direction from the design team.

Facebook Connect was a bit of a challenge to get working, but it will do everything we would like: sharing stories to people’s pages and giving us a way to connect people to their friends and others through news and discussion. As Brian has blogged – it gives us an interesting way to keep the conversation civil: don’t make a scene, others are watching.

There is a bit of a fly in the ointment: When is Facebook Connect going to launch? And where are all the partners? They’ve gone live with a few partners, but the service was supposed to officially launch mid-October after being pushed back earlier this year. And when they do – will they decide that some feature is not a good idea? Not being able to pull a person’s Facebook friends or push a story to their feed makes our application much less interesting.

We’re going to try find out what the plan is from the horse’s mouth, but it gives us pause – do we keep trucking with Facebook Connect and be one of the cool kids on the block when it launches? Or do we hedge our bets and go some other direction and loose some of the potential Facebook brings?

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.