UX/Service Design: Re-imagining Community Journalism
Timeframe: 6 months (part time)
Objective
Community Journalism aims to engage with readers to collect and share their stories across ranges of topics. I was brought into a multi-disciplinary huddle team focusing on editorial innovation as a senior UX Designer to take on discovery UX work and delivery UX work. My work started with re-imagining community journalism for both readers/contributors and the journalists collecting these pieces.
The purpose of the work was to reach wider audiences and find more diverse voices, including readers who were not aware of community journalism, and to raise the number of submissions received for pieces. There was also a purpose to better connect the different channels available for readers to engage with journalists and to make this more seamless with their reading experience.
The OKRs related to:
Increasing the proportion of responses to a community callout
Reducing the steps taken to process and utilise responses from 4 to 1
Increasing the number of community callouts added to articles by editors
Approach
I first led initial design workshops to gather existing pain points and to map out the different channels available to readers and journalists to engage. I then worked on a design brief and discovery research approach. My work included:
Analysing existing pain points collected
Interviews with community journalists
Interviews with other editorial stakeholders
Preparing key objectives, questions and approach for user research with readers (working with a senior user researcher to deliver this)
Simultaneously, I led workshops to validate existing insights / ideas and to generate new ideas, and entered the design phase for insights we already had high confidence on. Once new insights were available, these then also entered the design phase. My work included:
Synthesising and reviewing research insights
Detailing and validating concepts
Creating wireframes aligning to OKRs
Leading co-design sessions and workshops
Running user testing on series of prototypes
Running prioritisation workshops utilising user testing results
Delivering detailed user flows and service journey
Workshops: Reviewing insights & ideating
Wireframes & User flows
Workshops: Assessing & prioritising ideas
To-be journey
Outcomes
The key outcomes from this work included:
A series of prototypes and user flows for new or improved features - across the reader-facing website and mobile apps, journalist-facing web tools and other platforms such as email newsletters
A prioritised backlog of features for development (I worked closely with the product owner on this)
A holistic service journey, detailing how these features connected and the end-to-end experience for readers/contributors and journalists consuming community journalism
Communications and training around the changes implemented for journalist tooling
Identification of future opportunity areas as found in research
Final designs & prototypes
