Research – Future Tools for Journalists

By annezwaan May 1st, 2015

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

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

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

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…

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

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

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:

Sentiment Analysis
Automatically Tagging
Article Impact Prediction
Encrypted Messaging
Recommendation Systems
Content Extractor
Annotations / co-creating
Geo-tagging

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

User Story #4: Sentiment Analysis

User Story #4: Title Improvement

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.

By annezwaan April 2nd, 2015

Brainstorming!!!

On April Fool’s day, we arranged a meeting with Frank and Petra from De Persgroep (no joke!). The goal of this meeting was to come up with several possibilities for other prototypes. In order to have a good meeting, we came up with different strategies to do a good brainstorm session. Since we only had an hour, we divided the brainstorm session into two parts. The first part was about the view on the future of journalism in general. Everyone had to write down as many ideas as possible about the future of journalism on sticky notes in just ten minutes. After ten minutes, everyone told their ideas individually and we tried to organize everything in different general themes. As it turned out, we all organized our ideas according to six bigger themes: stories, reader, future, personalization, interaction and format. You can see our ideas below:

: Stories

: Reader

: Personalization

: Interaction

: Future

: Format

After we all did this, we started the second phase of the brainstorm session. Here’ we planned doing a brainstorm session according to the 635 method, which is more related to brain writing. You can read more about this here. During this session, everybody came up with three ideas in three minutes. After these minutes, everyone passed their paper to the person sitting on their left side. By doing so, all the ideas could be developed because every single person could take a look at it. We listed some of the most important ideas below:

Stories will adapt to the readers mood, or to the amount of time they have, their preferences, location etc. “Making the article smart”: the tool knows which topics you’re interested in by learning your behavior. This could also mean the tool selects the content based on your mood, health and surroundings.
The journalist of the future will use the crowd to get his information. By working like this, he or she will have a closer relationship with the audience. The crowd will also provide the journalist with expert info and let him/her know what topics are hot and interesting. In this way, readers can become experts on topics and provide the journalist with information about this expertise.
There should be an online dashboard that’s real time to see the success of a story. In this dashboard, there are tools integrated that help optimizing the success.
A tool should give direct feedback to the journalist while writing it, so that the story can become more successful. Criteria for what makes an article successful will be defined in it.
A tool should automatically tag all the content that is needed in order to write a story, like tweets, interviews, video, audio etc. These tags dynamically write the story, making the journalist a capturer and a organizer of information. In this tool, social media like tweetdeck are included.

These are the most important outcomes of the brainstorm session. Of course, there were many more ideas, which we will all keep in mind.

By annezwaan March 16th, 2015

The most essential week so far

Last Monday, we started the week with an ideation and sprint planning session. Together, we spent the whole morning thinking about what we would like to do during this sprint:

Sprint Planning

The week went by so fast, so that’s why we decided to write the blog post on the beginning of this week (the week of march 16th). After a few hours, we came up with ten different user stories, which we visualized below:

User Stories Sprint 2

We decided to continue the user stories that were about getting to know the professional journalist. Furthermore, we also wanted to interview the future journalist, that would be the students who are going to journalism schools right now. We have to create something for the future journalist, so talking to journalism students was essential in our point of view.

The main goal of Sprint 2 is to find a clear focus. At the end of this sprint, we want to be able to narrow down our research question (which is still quite big at the moment).

Another point of focus was to make a stakeholders map. In the sprint review with the Persgroep, Miriam advised us doing this, because it would give us a clear overview of all the stakeholders. This is the result:

Stakeholders Map (1)

Stakeholders Map (2)

On Tuesday morning, we discussed everything considering sprint 2 with Miriam. She advised us to extend the stakeholders map a bit more, what we did that afternoon. Furthermore, we decided it would be useful for us to create a document where we could write down the most important insights from this sprint. Here, we would ask ourselves these questions:

What were the goals?
What did we do?
What did we learn?
What didn’t we do?
What will we do?

By doing this and asking ourselves these questions, we have to ask ourselves ‘why’ more often, what is one of the main objectives of this sprint. The ‘why-question’ isn’t always an easy question, but it is a relevant question though. Especially Javier was very good in asking ‘why’ during our sprint planning session.

Meeting with Miriam

Interview with Stan

Tuesday, we had an interview with Stan. He’s a 20 year old New Media student who currently writes articles for Spunk and the Volkskrant. It was remarkable he notices the same as other people we had spoken so far:

There’s not a good search function/tool yet to search for articles. I myself lost an article once on the internet. But the internet also expands the lifespan. Paper articles you lose easier or just throw away. You can also recycle your own articles by using pieces of it in another new article.

According to him, the future of journalism is about digital storytelling:

Digital storytelling with interaction is really beautiful. It would be really cool if this would be better understandable and doable for the normal journalist.

We asked Stan about the citizen journalist too, because we want to know if we should focus on the citizen journalist or on the professional journalist. According to him, the citizen journalist won’t substitute the professional journalist. We decided to implement these kind of questions to our list, so we can come up with a clear conclusion about this after this sprint.

Ideation Workshop

On Wednesday morning, we had an ideation workshop with Charlie. This turned out to be a big brainstorm session about the existing prototype. Because we don’t have a prototype yet, we thought it would be quite hard. But what we did was very useful, because it made us think about the kind of prototype we would like to see. At the end of the brainstorm session, we came up with the idea of designing an interactive timeline, where information would be organized for the professional journalist, Twitter feeds would be visible and the lifespan of an article would be extended. Here you can see photos of that little eureka moment:

Ideation with Charlie

Thursday and Friday

Thursday and Friday were very productive days. Because Friday is usually the graduation day within our team (both Nikki, Michelle and I (Anne) are writing their thesis) and Anne has a deadline this week, we decided I would work on my thesis at home so she could attend the meeting at the AD on Friday. Petra invited us to come over to Rotterdam to talk to 4 journalists and see the editorial office of ‘Het Algemeen Dagblad’, the second biggest newspaper in The Netherlands. On Thursday, Nikki, Michelle en Javier went to the Persgroep to talk to the well-known dutch journalist Huib Modderkolk. This was a very inspiring meeting, where Huib responded positively on our idea of the interactive timeline. Furthermore, the idea of designing a tool for the citizen journalist was discarded then, which really helped us finding a clear focus.

On Friday, Michelle and I went to Rotterdam to see the editorial office of the AD. We both really liked seeing the working environment here. Petra planned four interviews for us, which was very useful (and intense at the same time!). As you can imagine, we couldn’t take any pictures there, but we did make a lot of notes from the conversations we had with four very interesting journalists. We were able to talk to two freelance journalists who went to the ‘Hogeschool for Journalistiek’ in Utrecht. The outcome from this was very useful for User Story 3.

We were also able to talk to Jeroen de Vreede, a datajournalist at AD. We thought we would interview him, but he just started telling everything he thought that could be useful for us, implicitly answering all our questions. For him, it was also very important for the future journalist to have a system where knowledge could be changed within a big company like AD. This is something we could easily implement in our prototype.

This Week

To conclude, last week was an essential week for our process. We collected so much information that we will process this week. By the end of this week, we’ll hopefully have (either paper or clickable) prototype which we can present to the Persgroep. It feels really good that we are getting more clear ideas about what we will develop in the coming 15 weeks.

By annezwaan February 20th, 2015

16-20 February

Another week has passed by, and we all agreed this week went so quickly! On Monday, we started with a workshop ‘Define Goals & Intentions’ from Charlie Mulholland. We found this one of the most inspiring and useful workshops so far. Especially the brainstorm session was a real eye-opener. First of all, we learned the correct way how to use sticky notes: you should always tear them from left to right instead from down to up. When you do it this way, the sticky note won’t curl up. We started the workshop with defining our problem in one sentence. Then, we had to write down the 5 W’s and 1 H: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. By doing this, we realized that we couldn’t answer the question why our problem needs to be solved yet in one concrete sentence. This is an important insight and we will do some research in the coming weeks to see if we are able to answer this challenging question. Afterwards, we did a brainstorm session where we all had to come up with different stakeholders, which we categorized in four different groups: project, users, third parties and future. After the workshop, we had to prepare lunch with our team. It was nice to prepare a lunch all together for a big group of people. After lunch, we had a meeting with Margreet, which was about Ideation and Sprint Planning. This meeting was very important, because we had to organize our Scrum Board in order to get a clear overview of all the different User Stories. The Friday before, we ended the week with the meeting with Alexander about the User Stories, so it was quite important for our team to really know how SCRUM works.

On Tuesday, we started working according these user stories, and our team worked like a Well-Oiled Machine, doing tasks for the first three user stories during the whole day. On Wednesday, we started the day with a workshop Visual Thinking from Agnes and Ilaria. Afterwards, we had a meeting with Margreet and Felipe, where we discussed everything we did so far. For example, we got some great feedback for interviewing journalists, adapted some of the questions and talked about general thing concerning Scrum. On Thursday, we worked on the User Stories and send all the relevant information to the Persgroep. We also got in touch with a Journalism teacher at the University of Amsterdam. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to talk to us next week. He did give us some very interesting information that we are researching right now. Next week, we’ll hopefully have interviews with different journalists from the Persgroep and finish some user stories.

medialab.publishingtools@gmail.com

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