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Future Tools for Journalists

On this blog we'll post everything we have done and what's on our mind.

The end of Sprint #4

Here we are again.. the end of Sprint 4! This incredibly short sprint lasted only 7 days. Kingsday was included here, but Nikki, Michelle and I also had to work on our thesis on Fridays. But now we are at the weekend before the peer pitch. Since Monday and Tuesday are holiday’s, we’ll start next week with Peer pitch #4! In this blogpost we’ll catch you up with everything we did in last few weeks.

The week of april 20-24

We started Monday the 20th of april with a sprint planning session. Together with the team, we came up with six different user stories, while we planned the sprint. You can see them below:

User Stories Sprint 4

User Stories Sprint 4

After the sprint planning session, that had been a while because all of the holidays we had in between. The Glass-kit team had to prepare it and it was nice to catch up with everyone!

MediaLAB Lunch

MediaLAB Lunch

In the evening, we had dinner at Geflipt with our team. It was really nice to be with our team and our coach Margreet in another environment than MediaLAB.

On Tuesday, we had a brainstorm session with some other MediaLAB students. Since the weather was good, we decided to do it outside. This was the result:

MediaLAB Brainstorm

MediaLAB Brainstorm

MediaLAB Brainstorm

MediaLAB Brainstorm

In the afternoon, we worked out all the ideas of the brainstorm session. It turned out we could divide the ideas of the group in six bigger themes.

Working...

Working…

On Wednesday, we had a workshop User Testing from Jochen. This was particularly useful, because we planned to do user tests at the Usability LAB in the week after. He really helped us using the eye tracking system.

April 28 – May 1st

On these days, we conducted user tests at the Usability Lab, making use of the eye-tracking system. Here are some photos from the results:

User testing at Usability Lab

User testing at Usability Lab

User testing at Usability Lab

User testing at Usability Lab

User testing at Usability Lab

User testing at Usability Lab

User testing at Usability Lab

User testing at Usability Lab

On the first photo, you can see that there is a glass wall in the Usability Lab, where the participants can’t look through. However, we could still see them. It was a really nice experience to work with a professional system like this and it gave us some great insights. For example, we came up with the idea of a pinboard as a way to organize information coming from different sources like file types, websites or platforms. Here, you could easily ‘pin’ the different sources and categorize them according to the article it relates. On this photo, you can see a heat-map that shows where a certain participant looks at while doing a user test.

Heat-map User Test

Heat-map User Test

With these results, we could see wether people looked at the right elements and check to what extent our tool is user-friendly.

Prototypes/modules

We also did a lot of research in this sprint about the different innovative techniques we could implement in our dashboard, to make sure it would become more innovative. Here’s a summary of it:

  1. Sentiment Analysis

  2. Automatically Tagging

  3. Article Impact Prediction

  4. Encrypted Messaging

  5. Recommendation Systems

  6. Content Extractor

  7. Annotations / co-creating

  8. Geo-tagging

We chose to make a prototype out of the first three:

User Story #4: Sentiment Analysis

User Story #4: Sentiment Analysis

User Story #4: Title Improvement

User Story #4: Title Improvement

User Story #4: Automatically Tagging

User Story #4: Automatically Tagging

 

Goals for Sprint #5

Right now, we are at the end of sprint #4. For Sprint #5, we hope to program our tools and insert the small prototypes we made during this sprint. Furthermore, we want to program our prototype and make it visually attractive. In the end, we also want to test our prototype, with the final design, and if there’s enough time, we want to adapt the feedback of the user tests to our prototype.

 

 

 

The 6th week already!

16-20 March

This week went by very fast! Our team is currently in such a good flow of energy, that time flies. This monday, we started wrapping up all the user stories that were already finished. We also decided this week would be important for Javier, the programmer of our team. We agreed he would use this week to program our prototype (the interactive timeline). Since he was at a conference in Hannover last monday, he was happy to finally start doing what he’s really good at: coding! For the first time, we’ve seen Javier in his natural habitat: focussing on 0’s and 1’s practically the whole day. We helped him by feeding him tea and fruit (yeah, he’s a healthy Spanish boy who doesn’t like coffee and really likes fruit). We’re very happy  to see the great progress he makes on the prototype!

On tuesday, we met Margreet again, who wasn’t there last week because she went on a holiday. We were happy to tell her the progress we made in the week before. Luckily, Miriam and Felipe provided us with some great feedback last week, so despite the fact we missed Margreet around us, the quality of our work was able to stay at the same level as before. On wednesday morning, we had a translate session with Margreet. We showed Margreet all the visualisations of the user stories that were both finished as in progress. She provided us with some great feedback, which we adapted that afternoon. An important insight was that we should always provide a visualisation with a good introduction or context, because just a visualisation of something cannot explain why something is visualised or what the motivations of it are. You can see some examples below:

StoryarticleFINAL

Story/Article

Stakeholders Map

Stakeholders Map

Michelle and Anne also did a cross-case analysis for user story 1 and 3, which are about the interviews with both the professional journalists as the journalism students. One of the windows at MediaLAB was covered by sticky notes that day:

Cross-Case Analysis

Cross-Case Analysis – tools

Cross-Case Analysis

Cross-Case Analysis – sticky notes everywhere…

On Thursday, Javier spent the whole day programming. At the end of the day, he looked like this:

Javier programming..

Javier programming..

A few hours later...

A few hours later…

Michelle en Nikki did some great job in making visualizations of all the user stories. Michelle spent a lot of time on visualizing the outcomes of the cross-case analysis, about which we can say we are quite proud of!

Cross-case Analysis

Cross-case Analysis

Michelle designing the visualization of the cross-case analysis

Michelle designing the visualization of the cross-case analysis

Nikki finished the personas of both the contemporary investigative journalist as the future investigative journalist, which helps us to better understand our user. She did a great job!

Persona contemporary investigative journalist

Persona contemporary investigative journalist

Persona future investigative journalist

Persona future investigative journalist

Anne spent time on wrapping up all the different stories in the insights document, from which you can see a preview below:

Insights Sprint 2 preview

Insights Sprint 2 preview

Next week, we’ll focus on the peer pitch on Wednesday, where we’ll pitch our first prototype to our peers. On friday, we’ll have a meeting with the Persgroep again, where we will show them all the outcomes of this sprint and of course the prototype too. Also, our team has to prepare lunch on monday, so we can use our creativity on a different level than connected to the future of journalism. We’ll keep you up-to-date!