Crunchberry Project

  

 

 

Image source: flickr/Giant Ginkgo

I have been stymied by trying to think of a name for our creation.   

“The process of naming also has its idiosyncrasies.  Sometimes you’ll set out to name a new product and the perfect name will be hanging there,  right out in front of you, just waiting to be snatched out of thin air.  Other times, you’ll mull for days, agonizing over the details of your product, entering in hundreds or thousands of options to your registrar with nothing sounding ‘just’ right,” according to Scott Trimble from Halfagain.com. 

The second part better describes my experience so far.  Our class developed a list of words that we would like to be associated with our creation (e.g. friendly and easy).  My first step was to use OneLook Reverse Dictionary, which generates words related to a word or phrase.  I hoped something would jump out at me.  Sadly, it did not.

So now I have turned to other online tools like Worldlab.com that has a tool called Name Builder -” Use this handy tool to jump start your naming process. Over 340,000 possible combinations and counting. Try it for a company name, rock band, album title, product name, book of poetry - just about anything that needs naming.”  When I entered “better news conversation” it suggested “BoxMetal.”

The search continues.

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.

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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.

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.