Audience Engagement and Onboarding with Hearken
Students are working closely with the team at Hearken, and are gaining valuable insights into how important audience engagement is to our media landscape.
An outgrowth of WBEZ’s Curious City, Hearken is an audience engagement platform that serves news organizations across the globe. Its model posits that a news organization’s performance will be stronger if it engages more regularly with audiences, using that engagement to guide its editorial direction and news coverage. Hearken uses what it calls an EMS, or Engagement Management System, which is the backend tool for its clients. Some of their clients settle into simple workflows and neglect to dig deeper into the platform’s power; this project will help envision, test, and potentially build a better onboarding and in-context tools for Hearken. (Onboarding is a system designed to help users acquire the knowledge required to use a tool, app, website, etc. In-context tools are those that appear within the environment itself—as opposed to a separate instruction manual, tutorial, or helper bot.)
This meaningful application to an existing piece of software will provide students with an opportunity to grapple with the difficulties of distilling important information into easy-to-digest, accessible chunks, at the appropriate moments, without annoying users. The problems students will solve relate to user flows, information design, and interaction design. Hearken aims to design and implement a new design and user flow for the EMS in early 2017, so your research and work will be crucial in helping them identify problem areas and ideate better solutions. Students will work closely with the team at Hearken, and will gain valuable insights into how important audience engagement is to our media landscape.
Faculty and Staff Leads
Project Details
2017 Winter
Important Questions
- What are the existing workflows for users of this system?
- When do users want help?
- What areas of the platform are least-accessed?
- How do users currently seek and receive help?
- How might we organize information to make it easily accessible?
Sample Milestones
- Weeks 1-2 Ramp Up. Read the brief, dig into the EMS, interview users and write a user interview report.
- Weeks 3-4 Defining the problem. More user research, distilling information into a series of insights and problem statements.
- Weeks 4-5 Product Distillation, feature sketching, concept selection.
- Weeks 6-7 Prototyping, quick iteration cycles.
- Weeks 8 Polishing prototype, circulating to users.
- Weeks 9-10 Feedback, polishing, final project documentation.
Outcome
At the conclusion of this project, students will present Hearken with a summation of problem areas of the EMS, and a prototype for an onboarding system (and perhaps beyond to help functionality), grounded in user research outcomes and rigorous testing. Students will learn the ins and outs of design research, prototyping, and interaction design, as well as gain valuable experience working alongside an innovative media company.
Resources and Readings
- The Risky Business of Onboarding — Rick Pastoor, A List Apart
- A Roadmap to Building a Delightful Onboarding Experience... — Anton Kosolapov, Smashing Magazine
- From Touchpoints to Journeys Seeing the World as Customers Do — Nicolas Maechler, Kevin Neher, and Robert Park, McKinsey Quarterly
- Design for Real Life — Eric Myer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher
- What We Mean When We Talk About Engagement — Jennifer Brandel, Hearken
- Seven Things I Never Learned in Journalism School — Jennifer Brandel, Hearken
- Give The Audience What They Want or Need? There’s an Even Better Question — Jennifer Brandel, Hearken
- Design Thinking And Journalism Go Together- Here’s How — Jennifer Brandel, Hearken
Presentation Slides
Students
