Bringing user experience design to journalism education

April 14, 2012 by professorkim 2 Comments

Jonathan Stray is a computer scientist and journalist who heads up a team at the Associated Press that creates interactive news stories. He has great ideas about how computer science can be used to make journalism more credible, sustainable and responsive to citizens’ needs.

He also asks really good questions that challenge treasured shibboleths in our profession. For example, Stray challenges the simplistic notion that our job is simply to deliver news. In the era before computational media, there was a logic to this – we reported; our readers, listeners and viewers decided. When done well and fairly, democracy was served. At least that was the hope, or as political science Jay Rosen might say, that’s our creed. But the computer scientist in Stray doesn’t abide such fluffy abstractions. In an excellent essay that is well worth considering in its entirety, he asserts,

Democracy is fine, but a real civic culture is far more participatory and empowering than elections. This requires not just information, but information tools.

What are information tools? What are they used for? By whom? How? How do we know when they work? These are the questions Stray tries to get us to think about by starting with the needs of our news users, instead of starting where we usually do, which is with the stories we are trying to report and disseminate. It’s hard to argue with him in principle, but what does it mean in practice? As he points out, it’s more than experimenting with story forms and distribution platforms.

To create tools, understand the customer

Stray’s line of reasoning took me back to lessons I learned from Bell Labs quality engineers in the 1980s about quality by design: quality is fitness for use by a customer. Product or service design requirements should flow from an understanding of customers’ needs. Customers are both internal (other members of an organization’s supply chain) and external (end users). Quality by design is a process of continual improvement, based on continual communications with internal and external stakeholders. Methodologies such as Total Quality Management and Quality Function Deployment were developed to operationalize those principles and generalize them as approaches to product and service development and marketing.

News Design=User Experience Design

Now comes the field of user experience design as a way of focusing an organization on ways of understanding and staying responsive to user needs. Most recently, I’ve been wrapping my mind around the literature on user experience design, especially, Whitney Quesenberry and Kevin Brook’s book, Storytelling for User Experience. Stray’s post is helping me think more concretely about how user experience design applies to journalism practice, and by extension, journalism education.

Smashing magazine has a concise introduction to user experience design that includes this definition of user experience:

User experience (abbreviated as UX) is how a person feels when interfacing with a system. The system could be a website, a web application or desktop software and, in modern contexts, is generally denoted by some form of human-computer interaction (HCI).

Fields of User Experience — From the blog A Nod to Nothing: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/

For journalists, the challenge is to think about how our readers, viewers and users feel when interacting with our news products. According to our civic mission, we want them to feel invested in their communities, engaged in civic life, and empowered to act on the issues that matter to them.

Ethnography is one of the interesting techniques that the AP is using to understand user needs. In 2008, the Associated Press commissioned an ethnographic study of young news consumers. Nathanael Boehm neatly summarizes the role of ethnographic research in improving user experience:

Where usability is about how people directly interact with a technology in the more traditional sense, ethnography is about how people interact with each other. As UX designers, we’re primarily concerned with how we can use such research to solve a problem through the introduction or revision of technology.

What AP learned from its study of upscale “digital natives” in the US, UK and India is that the news consumers they’d most like to attract are often so overwhelmed by facts that they don’t seek the depth and context. Yet Stray notes that Wikipedia draws millions of users who invest significant time and energy on the site, suggesting that news organizations take a lesson.

From principle to practice

There is a great deal more that can be explored here, even as we think about journalism’s mission. For example, one of Stray’s pet projects is the development of an infographic tool that maps pundits’ sources of information. The ability to visually represent this kind of information can be helpful in assessing the credibility of claims. For my part, I’ve been thinking about tools that make complex data more intelligible to the people who need it. For example, this semester, my students and I are thinking about social media tools that will make it easier to make sense of environmental data that affects their lives. We want to improve the accessibility of such tools as the Environmental Protection Agency’s EJView and the state of New Jersey Department of Environmental Protechon’s Data Miner sites. More about this work in a future post.

On the Grid: Teaching and Research in the Digital Age

April 9, 2012 by professorkim Leave a Comment

Archived U-Stream live feed:

Video streaming by Ustream

Video streaming by Ustream

Fellow Panelists: Alison Clarke, Simone Browne, Howard Ramsby. Moderator: Thomas DeFrantz.

I love, Thomas’ poetic articulations of issues, the more I listen to them. I think I will spend much time watching videos of his performances. I so appreciate Alison Clark’s practical wisdom. I will be sitting at her feet, you can be sure. Howard Ramsby’s description of childen’s excitement at receiving physical letters and his linking of social media profiles to the tradition of persona poems. Simone’s linking of contemporary biometric technologies to historical traditions of slave branding was one of many insights that has my wheels turning.

How to bring it all together, how to mine this and all of the wisdom in the service of my various roles – developing an inclusive pedagogy for journalism/IMM, functioning as an African American Studies Department Chair, participating in the public sphere? Much to continue to contemplate here. So grateful to my fellow panelists, all the panelists, Mark Anthony Neal, all of the folks and the John Hope Franklin Center.

Leap-frogging the Matrix: A Collage Inspired by Black Thought 2.0

April 9, 2012 by professorkim Leave a Comment

Note: This past weekend (April 6-7, 2012), I participated in Black Thought 2.0: New Media and the Future of Black Studies. The event was the brainchild of Duke University African American Studies professor Mark Anthony Neal and was held at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

The program consisted of a Friday evening keynote address in which sociologist S. Craig Watkins shared his research on young people’s engagement with media technologies and the effort to deploy those technologies to create more effective, culturally responsive learning environments inside and outside of school. He called upon Black Studies departments to do more to make the physical and intellectual resources of the Academy available to those stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide. This was followed by four Saturday panels that contemplated, the history of African American engagement with the Internet, teaching and research in the digital age, internet activism, and the role of the black public intellectual in social media. The event was a dynamic interplay between face-to-face and virtual participants since it was live-streamed and live-tweeted.

Videos of the conference are being edited and will be archived for public viewing at the Franklin Center’s YouTube channel.

This is the first of what I suspect will be several personal ruminations on this event.

Leap-frogging the Matrix

Sojourner Truth sold the “shadow to support the substance.”

We store her shadow in clouds for sampling remixing reusing

What is the essence that we download?

I am not being plain. Let me tell you what I mean.

Long ago I learned to seek truth like Diogenes

Holding the tales of my griots aloft

I headed for the agora that had not imagined me.

Straining ears and eyes for places to connect

And Terry said , “Try to remember, my dear, we’re only pilgrims here…”

“Discourse” from WTSR-FM: A conversation about ACTA and Internet freedom

April 8, 2012 by professorkim Leave a Comment

On April 4, I was interviewed by TCNJ students Melissa Radzimski and Amanda Reddington, hosts of the WTSR-FM radio show, “Discourse” on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and other issues related to Internet freedom and intellectual property rights. It was a wide-ranging conversation that included tome discussion of the history of the Internet. I appreciated the host’s invitation and enjoyed the conversation. We’d all love to hear your thoughts.

Interview with Kim Pearson (Civic Media Researcher) by Wtsrnews on Mixcloud

On teaching game design in a journalism class, Part 4: Newsgames as literary journalism

January 4, 2012 by professorkim 1 Comment

In the last blog entry on my newsgames class, I reported on my students’ remix of my intentionally buggy, incomplete Food Stamps game. That exercise served multiple purposes:

It provided an accessible example of the challenges of conceiving a newsgame, and for defining requirements for such a game as journalism and as a game.
Splitting the students into groups focused on specific aspects of the game (story, media, gameplay) afforded an opportunity to reinforce and extend ideas in their texts through collaboration and peer teaching.
It provided a natural segue into guiding students into the development of their own games.

One of the first challenges of getting students thinking about the requirements for their own game projects is that I found no literature on how one actually reports and organizes information for a newsgame, not to mention the ethical standards that ought to apply. Game designers are accustomed to thinking conceptually not literally, so they take liberties that potentially violate the canon of journalism ethics. This has led to some interesting discussions with colleagues. For example, in 2008, my computer science colleagues and I were planning the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers, one of my colleagues had one of our research assistants build a Scratch game that offered a crude representation of the issue of global warming. In the game, clicking on the aerosol raises the earth temperature until the planet explodes:

I expressed concern about the scientific inaccuracy of the game, and we had an extended discussion about how literal the game needed to be. Interestingly, the project generated nearly 700 views and dozens of comments and remixes, including a debate about global warming. In addition, both this researcher and another student colleague built a number of interesting prototypes, including this game about campus cafeteria food options:

With this experience and my magazine writing background in mind, I opted to teach the students to think of the reporting and storytelling aspects of the game as a kind of linear, multi-threaded literary journalism. Literary journalism combines the factual reporting of journalism with much of the artistic freedom of literature.

Reporting

We reviewed the reporting process of collecting data from secondary sources and primary sources, interviewing, and organizing information in cluster diagrams. I had them give me abstracts and annotated source lists, as I would in a magazine writing class. Because we lost the first two weeks of classes due to Hurricane Irene, this process was somewhat truncated, but we did spend some time on interviewing and vetting sources. We also spent a lot of time on copyright, ethics, libel and defamation rules. We also talked about the fact that narrative newsgames are often built on a degree of fictionalization and the creation of composite characters – practices that would be considered unethical in literary journalism.

We talked about ways of mapping story structure to game mechanics. And we talked a lot about new journalism with its emphasis on scene-by-scene construction, changing points of view, dialogue and experimentation in narrative structure. We did close readings of Gay Talese, Susan Orlean and Jimmy Breslin.

We talked about strategies for fulfilling or confounding audience expectations in order to create suspense and engagement. I used clips from the 80s TV show, Moonlighting, which does this brilliantly:

Parodying Dr. Seuss:

Taking an irreverent approach to a classic, also breaking the fourth wall:

As we brainstormed about their game ideas, Moonlighting also helped me introduce them to genres that might be suitable for the storytelling for their games, but with which they were unfamiliar. For example, I suggested that the conventions of film noir might be worth exploring for one group’s game about the workings of Ponzi schemes.

With the students’ permission, I soon hope to share some examples of the ways in which they applied these ideas to their games.