By Nuno Vargas
The
way we told stories in the past doesn’t always work today.
Traditionally,
editors and reporters would think of stories they believed the audience needed,
and then deliver those stories as best they could. But in our increasingly
mobile and wired world, audiences change quickly. How can an editor be
confident that a story that seems important to the audience really is?
The
short answer: By getting to know the audience so deeply that their needs are
revealed. If that sounds impossible, take heart. A new approach is proving to
be an ideal way to make it possible.
The Design School at Stanford
University developed design thinking, its groundbreaking approach to human-centered design,
to allow those who develop products and services to better understand their
users' needs. Journalists are applying design thinking to strengthen news
reporting all around the world.
Strong
journalism requires deep reporting. Human-centered design, with its focus on
detecting the needs of end users, provides tools for doing just that kind of
journalism. It satisfies the call for reporting that takes a deep dive into a
subject.
Hala Nigeria, a project of the ICFJ Knight International
Journalism Fellowships, has taken the principles of design thinking, and the
tools that are based on them, to Nigeria, where citizens’ needs for solid
health information are fundamental – and often a matter of life and death.
Getting
started: the empathy phase
Empathy
is the core element of design thinking, and it's a vital part of any successful
engagement strategy for media products.
Hala
Nigeria, which I assist, has a straightforward but profound goal: To
"increase public engagement and amplify citizen voices in health news in
Africa’s most populous country."
But
driving engagement is anything but easy in today's world of information
overload. To succeed, you must understand the needs of the people you are
trying to reach, their thoughts, emotions and motivations. Only then will you
be able to design a way to best approach them.
Human-centered
design thinking as pioneered at Stanford allows us to draw a blueprint for how
to reach people in a way that compels them to engage. We draw this blueprint by
first understanding the choices each person makes, and the reasons behind those
choices, as well as by observing the person's behavior.
These
observations will produce insights that will lead news organizations to design
better ways to reach their audiences in ways that leave them ready and eager to
act or engage.
Journalists
are natural-born design thinkers
Journalists
ask questions – and doing that is at the heart of human-centered design. We
build empathy with our subjects by listening to their stories, talking to them,
and working alongside them. By immersing ourselves in their lives, we learn the
details, the not-so-obvious facts.
Typically,
we listen and observe so that we can best understand the situation our sources
find themselves in, allowing our stories to go deeper.
So
why can’t journalists use these same skills, these same powers of observation, to
learn what our readers’ needs are when it comes to the news they get from us?
We can, and increasingly we are.
It’s not always easy, though.
Every audience represents a different challenge. Boosting their engagement with
news - even really important news, like the health-related work so badly
needed in Nigeria - is a complicated matter.
This
is particularly true in a place as diverse and spread out as Nigeria. Habits,
traditions and local characteristics all play a role in making our potential
audience engage with certain stories and ignore others. Every group behaves
differently. These factors are only compounded when a user believes the news he
or she encounters is related to something as important and urgent as giving
birth or immunizing your child against polio.
Putting
design thinking into action in Nigeria
So
how did we put these insights to use in Nigeria, as part of the Hala Nigeria
program?
Teams conducted interviews and
observed the behavior of potential news consumers. The teams, made up of finalists
from the Hala Nigeria program, went into the areas where their stories were
happening and interviewed the subjects of their story, who are also the “users”
or consumers of the end product.
They
gathered insights from what they heard, but also from what they saw. The
recorded not only the answers, but their subjects' emotional reactions and body
language. They usually interviewed each user more than once, typically while
going through his or her normal daily routine.
Stepping
back, looking for insights
After
the interviews, we looked over the information that had been gathered in the
empathy phase and scrubbed it for insights.
Insights
work as nonverbal clues, the way people say things, their body language, their
emotions while addressing an issue. We also looked for “need-finding factors,”
or unmet needs. Need-finding comes from the objective realization that several
needs are not being fulfilled, and that there is room for improvement.
One
reporter interviewed a man about self-medication. Initially, the man said that
he always takes his malaria tablets. Yet the reporter noted something
inconsistent in his body language, and asked a few more questions.
By the end
of the interview, the man shared that he normally buys knock-off malaria pills
because they are cheaper. These are a problem in Nigeria because they may be
fake or expired, providing no protection against the disease and potentially
causing more harm than good.
Developing
solutions to meet real needs
The
challenge is to use all these insights to first understand what the users’ real
needs were, and then to apply our own expertise as journalists to develop media
solutions that can meet those needs.
A
team reporting on traditional birth attendants initially focused on the subject
of modernizing health care conditions and the need to make more deliveries
happen in hospitals. But after a series of interviews, the reporters detected
that the story was really that hospital workers had not earned the trust of
expectant mothers, who avoided the hospital as a result.
Over two days, we helped the
teams clear up misconceptions, re-focus on their users, and relentlessly
challenge a number of assumptions related to the stories they felt they should
be telling. Against all this, we asked them over and over to re-examine their
assumptions about the stories’ capacity to drive engagement.
In
one case we realized that users who had been victims of medical malpractice
weren't even aware of the real disease that they were being treated for, let
alone if the treatment was adequate. In another case, the users were taking
fake malaria pills because they had been advised by their pharmacist, who also
turned out to be a fake, but whom they still trusted because “it was the only
medical advice they had near."
By
the end, all of the teams had a clear understanding of what the users'
information needs were. They each had a clear set of engagement-driven features
ready to be deployed in several different ways. A team of judges selected the
most promising projects, and the media organizations working on those projects
now have embedded technologists to help bring the audience-engagement
strategies to fruition.
The
beauty of the process – and its frustration, too – is that the iteration cycle
can be repeated again and again until we’re as close to perfect as time allows.
The
next iteration of the project will involve improving our solutions by crossing
them with external big data sets from government and non-government sources and
accessing what technological resources are the most effective to build our
product.
This
last element is vital in a country like Nigeria, where feature phones are the
most-used mobile device, online connections can be temperamental and a big part
of the population is not exposed to this kind of technology.
Photo
Credit: Patrick Butler, ICFJ.
Source: http://ijnet.org
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