Improving story creation with Storyful’s Newswire
The Problem
Storyful is a social media newsroom. They help publishers tell accurate stories faster, with investigative research backed up with videos and images from across the digital landscape to offer partners a deeper, more complete understanding of events. The current system for adding this content to Storyful’s platform was tedious: a lot of time was spent manually entering and transferring details (social media contact info, location, source etc) and uploading content. When it comes to breaking news, this was time they couldn’t afford to lose.
My team’s objective was to remove friction from the journalists’ current process. Put simply, we wanted to get rid of unnecessary tasks so they could focus on more important work.
My Process
Define
To understand the problem we used a number of user experience research exercises. First, we shadowed the users, observing how they worked day to day. This gave us a good idea of their process and helped us identify patterns.
Once we discovered a clear pattern in the journalists’ process we could easily map out their User Journey. Mapping a user flow has a clarifying effect: it’s hard to empathise with a process without a visual map. We also conducted user interviews to help us create accurate ‘personas’ for different types of users. This helped us establish their main goals and identify pain points we may not have detected during the shadowing exercise. These ‘personas’ became the centre of point of the solution
Notable findings
Through our research we identified a clear pattern in how journalists work. A story begins with uncovering a single piece of newsworthy content from the web (TweetDeck, Facebook, Instagram, websites or blogs). From this point they would locate more content supporting this story. The journalist would bounce from the platform CMS to their browsers collecting as much information (pictures, screenshots, videos, tweets, Facebook messages) as possible to provide context to news stories. This back and forth (sometimes with over twenty open tabs)was where we saw potential for improvement!
Develop
Once the team had defined and understood the user problem, we used ideation exercises to flesh out different solutions to the problem. My favourite approach is to outline several user need statements. These statements are stuck on the wall and people from different disciplines are invited to brainstorm solutions - no idea is a bad idea! These ideas are written on post-its and grouped together into categories. This collaborative process allows for varied solutions, as contributors come from different backgrounds. For this project we included a journalist, developers, and a product manager. From here we mapped out the possible solutions onto an effort versus impact matrix. This gave us some clear focus and direction. From this point I created low fidelity wireframes to build a basic prototype. We then tested the prototype with a number of journalists. After working out the kinks I fleshed out the UI and worked with the dev team to build and iterate on a working piece of software!
Design
Our solution: the Inside Out extension. The extension allowed journalists to collect and build their stories from within their browsers before entering the platform CMS. The Chrome extension was a simple, lightweight solution that fitted in with their current process. When a journalist found something they deemed newsworthy, they would simply hover over the piece of content (image, Tweet, Facebook message, video), and our ‘iO’ button would appear in the corner. With a simple click of the button, the content was added to a draft story (not unlike a checkout basket!). Journalists could now collect content without bouncing back and forth, and we removed their need for having twenty tabs open. When enough supporting content was collected, a simply click of the ‘create story’ button brought them to the platform CMS where they could focus on completing the story.
From shadowing and digging into their processes we were able to identify opportunities where we could enter smart defaults for each story. The extension automatically collected and entered all the small details the journalists had been manually inputting into the CMS (eg. source information, location, contact etc).
