UX/Service Design: Re-imagining Investigative Journalism

Timeframe: 6 months (part time)

Objective

Investigative journalism aims to engage with ‘sources’ who can share confidential information securely and conveniently. There was a need to review and improve the current tools available to investigative journalists to communicate with sources, receive information and collaborate both internally with colleagues and externally with sources and other organisations. I led a discovery project to explore the as-is experience for both sources and journalists and to create the future end-to-end experience for secure investigations.

The purpose of the work was born out of security need - to create a new secure & collaborative environment for investigative journalism - and coupled with a desire to complete these from a user-centric perspective, to create new environments which work together to serve the investigative journalism agenda of safety and convenience. I both led the discovery project and worked with the existing product team to design and deliver the first new tool for the ecosystem: a mobile app based tool to enable secure ‘first contact’ between sources and journalists.

Approach

The first part of my work included interviewing business and technical stakeholders to understand the problem statements and history of the work. I then scoped out the design brief and created a user research plan. The following discovery activities included:

• Running user research interviews with investigative journalists, editors and collaborating journalists.

• Running stakeholder interviews to segment the users involved and create a draft as-is journey.

• Analysing and presenting findings on the pain points uncovered.

• Running a design workshop to further build out the as-is journey, user personas, ‘jobs to be done’ and value canvases.

• Running a design workshop to brainstorm and ideate further on existing solution ideas, and to start building draft to-be journeys.

• Reviewing and prioritising ideas, clustering these into new tools to deliver different user goals.

• Creating a draft to-be service journey highlighting the new concepts and value across the journey.

• Presenting findings and to-be journeys to key stakeholders.

Simultaneously, I led the design of the Secure Messaging tool, a new feature built into the mobile apps to allow sources to reach out to journalists and desks securely. This included:

• Gathering user and business requirements.

• Researching and exploring different UX patterns to drive the behaviours.

• Leading co-design sessions with the team.

• Wireframing the solution and working with stakeholders to make key product decisions.

• Working closely with a UI/visual designer to create final prototypes.

• Conducting user testing and analysing results.

• Leading design reviews and sign-off with key stakeholders.