The Mayville Gazette: an insideout redesign
For a second round of interviews for an internship, I was given a full day to redesign a content management system for jounalists having a poor front (and back-end) experience and helping them deal with bugs and innaccurate content online.
Overview
The Mayville Gazette needs a makeover, from the inside and out. Readers are having a poor experience online and circulation numbers have likely dropped and the newsroom has less than 150 journalists working on staff. The website and content management system (CMS) require redesigns. An slow iterative redesign based off the current system is ideal but due to a system crash, that information is not available.
I designed a new CMS that mergers the multiple systems into one. Instead of a photo, video, interactive, page layout and separate database system, they all work together now. During these tough times, The Gazette hired inexpensive journalists; young journalists; who used tools like Gchat, Wave, Docs, SMS and mobile uploading. The new system accounts for the mobile journalist, the Mo'Jo. A CMS and website redesign should be done in tandem. These solutions attend to the internal system and mechanisms to fix inaccurate content online. The second phase will be to redesign the website such that the content sings and readers have a positive experience consuming the news.
I outlined some crafty bots to help fix up the site. With a little attention from the staff, corrections, retractions, broken links and missing images can be fixed up so readers will flock to their site.
I tacked up the assignment and my goals on my desk to help me stay focused.
All journalists are mobile now. They need solutions from the field.
1. Content flows in from many locations. 2. Link communication tools to the CMS 3. Make the CMS do robot work.
Research
Research guides my design. I spoke with and studied journalists, web editors and engineers to better understand the problem space. Detailed documentation lives on a Google Doc.
Ethnographic Observation
I visited the Indiana Daily Student Newspaper newsroom to do ethnographic research. The design of a content management system must does not exist in a vacuum. I went to the newsroom to understand how content producers and editors work together and with their tools.
Managing Editor, Ben Phelps looks over the design of the front page with a desk editor.
Talking with journalists
I spoke over phone, email and instant message with journalists around the country about their newsrooms and workflows. I spoke with the homepage editor of the St. Petersburg Times, the Assistant Systems Manager of the Indianapolis Star, a web intern at Time Magazine, a designer/developer for Gannett Content One, an IxD Consultant for the Idaho Mountain Express, a Web Assistant at Esquire Magazine, Managing Editors at the Indiana Daily Student and a senior engineer and lead mobile engineer at Mint.com.
What journalists want
They want a new CMS. Simply stated, every professional working with a news content CMS was unhappy with their current tools. Current CMS systems are inflexible, do not offer enough control and do not handle photo, video and interactive content well. Professionals say their tools are intimidating, hard to use and "cold" in the design. They are not intuitive. The students at Indiana University, however, are using a premier custom developed tool by students that satisfies more needs than those of professionals. Student journalists enjoy the drag and drop and custom headline tools to lay out their front page.
With an affinity diagram I identified the most important issues to be data organization, wanted features and communication tools.
Editing and publishing interface
The interface is designed to make editing content much easier for web editors and journalists without digital skills. The most unique feature is the drag and drop layout tool. Almost every journalist wanted more control over the layouts of their webpages. Many argued that HTML coding is cumbersome and not realistic for those in the newsroom. There is a preview of the current layout and suggested photos or graphics based on meta data.
Headlines, decks, and content is written iteratively. All the boxes are given expandable fields. I found in my ethnographic research that editors like to write out 4 or 5 headlines then play with the words to see what fits and makes sense.
In this CMS the content merges seamlessly to print or web. The content is not stored in two locations that need to be updated seperately. Journalist are given tools like a post-dated publish, automated tags and the flexibility to import content from tools that exist outside the CMS.
The chat feature is developed for collaborative working and integrates chat clients that the journalists are already be using.
Prototyping
I rely on my sketchbook and pens for ideation. My phone and computer helped me for interviews and the peach rings were a vital delicious treat.
Narrowing the scope
There are never enough time or resources. I narrowed the scope and designed the interface for an editing and publishing tool. However, the greater system mergers the photo database, video database, print page layouts, newspaper archives, flagged content and comment moderation. This should streamline the posting process and help journalists spend more time producing quality content rather than fighting with technology. I also designed a system to handle current errors on the website.
Usability Study
I tested the new interface for the editing and publishing tool. Journalists (users) like the WYSIWYG interface. The flexibility to tag and organize information was helpful along with chat tools to communicate. It was most difficult to understand how to add a picture to an article and adjust its size and alignment.
Users successfully posted the story to the web at present time, in the future. They also had little to no difficulty adding another author or adding sections or tags to a story.
Fixing Content
The Mayville Gazette readers are having a poor experience due to low-quality content. According to Janet Berlin, "some articles need correction or retraction, others contain broken links or missing images. Nobody at the paper quite knows exactly what's fit to print - and what needs fixing."
Which processes can be automated by machines and which require human attention?
Error Bot
Some human moderation will be required. All live pages on the site can be assigned and distributed to journalists within the newsroom. These people can make content judgment. A bot can be written to click on links and detect broken images at night, when traffic low.
When an error is detected, a bug tracker will log this information and send a notification to the journalist responsible for that page. The journalist then reviews which correction ran in print and selects the corresponding online article (bottom left) that matches the correction. The journalist then manually makes the correction (right).
Corrections Bot
The same bot be programmed to scan the content of the print pages of the newspaper. A workflow can be designed to communicates with the web CMS. This bot will search in the corrections and retractions in the print pages, since they are always designed in the same place in print. The bot will then search the web CMS for potential matching articles. Here the owner for that page can use their news judgment to determine how the correction should be rewritten for the web story.
Future Iterations
For the next iteration, I would like to develop the interface of the photos section itself. This would be primarily used by photo editors and page designers. There will be be a better bridge between all members working on the articles. The tools can suggest which photos and articles likely pair together based on which stories have been planned together, which people worked together, when content was added to the system and tags that exist in the meta-data.
Furthermore I would like to develop the part of the system that communicates with mobile journalists. I would like to design the interface in the CMS, for what happens when a journalist sends a text, tweet, email or document. It must run through an editor before going online.
And most importantly, in tandem with the CMS redesign, a new look for the front end of The Mayville Gazette website is likely to be necessary to improve the reader experience.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Janet Berlin, Richard Kanno and Krispin Leydon. I would also like to thank William Couch, Darla Cameron, Jacqui Banasknysky, Chris Zaluski, Ben Phelps, Malinda Aston, Cori Faklaris, Kristi Olaffson, Allie Townsend, Atish Mehta, Peter Stevenson, Joey Marburger and CJ Page for help on such short notice for this project.