Crunchberry Project

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.