We are aware that, as with any research study, there are so many variables that we can test effectively. But the prototype that has been prepared addresses many of the key issues, some of which will have to be tested not through EyeTrack specifically, but by observation at the test centers, and through exit interviews. Nonetheless, because so much of this material is new, I am certain that any information that the new Poynter EyeTrack can provide will be welcome, and will contribute to stimulate the discussion.

We will be conducting some of the first round of testing at Medill over the next couple of weeks. More updates to come. For now, if you are interested in the EyeTrack project you can also follow the research on our Facebook page.

Society of News Design

The competition was rigorous and the decisions difficult but the five World’s Best Designed are:

• CNN.com: World’s Best-Designed News Web Site
• CNN for iPad: World’s Best Designed News App
• The Globe and Mail: World’s Best-Designed News Web site
• The Guardian for iPhone: World’s Best-Design Mobile App
• NPR for iPad: World’s Best-Designed News App

Just about all of the winning news organizations designed incredible experiences across multiple platforms. Picking which organization on which platform might have been the most difficult part of the judging.

You can read more about the reasoning behind the awards here.

It used to be that calling a journalist a “hack” was considered an insult. Now, tack on “-er” and more than likely the reporter will be flattered. Today tech-savvy journalists are mapping stories, figuring out new ways to share mobile-based news, and changing how investigative reporters gather and analyze their information. This expanding digital landscape for news, especially the significance of data and the promise of mobile, means that computer programming is becoming yet another skill to be taught in journalism classes.

Read more.

He distrusts the singular voices of news authority that past generations accepted, and he consumes most of his information on his mobile phone or tablet. Newscaster lets him program news from his chosen sources, in his own time frame and in the format that works for him.

About the Audience

American teens consume more almost 3 hours more mobile video than the general population — seven hours and 13 minutes a month in the fourth quarter of 2010; and they watch eleven hours fewer of television — 23 hours and 41 minutes a week for teens, according to June 2011 Nielsen study.

State of Video News

Broadcast news solemnly announced the death of president John F. Kennedy, shared images of Vietnam War, showed the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding and tracked the World Trade Center towers as they collapsed. News video is still powerful way to tell important stories, but in today’s media climate, teens are more likely to watch a 90-second video of a baby dancing along with a music video than they are to watch any nightly newscast.

The ratings of broadcast newscasts indicate this trend. Since 1980, the three commercial evening newscasts [ABC, CBS and NBC] have lost 28.9 million viewers, or 55.5 percent of the audience they once had — even while the US population has risen by more than 81 million, according to the Pew Research Center’s State of the Media, February 2011

New Devices

The explosion of tablet devices from Apple, Motorola, HP and others creates an opportunity for news video purveyors. Tablet adoption is outpacing even the most optimistic projections from just a few years ago. According to BIGresearch [Copyright 2011, Prosper], 89 percent of iPad owners watch news video regularly — more than almost any other video category other than Movies. But for 18-34 year olds that number falls to 76 percent — putting it behind Cartoons and Dramas as well as Movies. In the past year, mobile traffic went from 2 percent to 15 percent of all traffic to Wired Magazine’s website, said Editor in Chief. Evan Hansen, and the iPad was the single biggest source of mobile traffic.

Video Affordances

Readers leafed through newspapers on their own choosing which articles to read thoroughly, skim or ignore. Radio and television only allowed consumers to select a station; not actually the content they wanted to listen to or watch. Remote controls for televisions and radios increased the likelihood that the public would interact to the extent of changing stations more frequently.

Initially this was a linear experience; to get from Channel 2 to 5 usually meant flipping through the channels in between. Eventually remotes allowed users to entered channel numbers, but as the number of channels offered doubled and tripled in number the thousands of choices made it more difficult to switch between stations.

Moreover, until the 1980s consumers had to consult a print media source to learn program availability. Eventually on-screen guides allowed users to see view and eventually switch to specific programs or record upcoming ones. But even this does not allow viewers to watch individual stories in a news show.

Teenage video consumers have grown up watching individual clips on YouTube. They expect to know what story — not just what show — they are watching, how long that clip is and what related clips are available. They do not trust media professionals to produce a ‘show’ for them. Instead they pick their own video clips or watch something recommended by friends and, in turn, pass on whatever they find interesting.

News Media Opportunity

Newscaster offers traditionally print-focused news organizations two opportunities. First, newspaper publishers can reinvent the video-based news experience instead of ceding it to terrestrial broadcasters. By creating a marketplace for video and seeding their own videos alongside those of broadcast companies they can set the standards for quality and style. They can also convince teenage news consumers that they gather relevant news, not just produce irrelevant newspapers. Second, they can associate faces with news stories as television has done successfully for several generations. Newspaper editors, columnists or reporters could star in simple video stories that break news.

Competitive Landscape

Broadcast television companies like Fox, ABC, NBC and CBS have focused first on non-news video streamed online. Teenagers watch hours of sitcoms through sites like Hulu. This partnership across content providers proves it is possible for rivals to cooperate and for streaming video to attract large audiences. But the news content is presented in the form of whole shows and is not usually posted quickly enough to satisfy teenage consumers used to instant gratification.

Google News is a highly trafficked news aggregator but it emphasizes text (more easily searched) over video and lacks editorial judgment in the stories presented. ESPN’s iOS radio application allows consumers to create personal filters for news looking for specific cities, teams or players but only for audio content. CNN’s smartphone app also allows users to set personalization options but only for CNN video. NPR’s smartphone and tablet applications transformed radio listening letting users program a newscast but only from a single source and only audio. Broadcast and cable news providers like MSNBC and Fox News allow consumers to watch live streamed video and individual news clips but only from a single news source.

Underlying Technology

Newscaster can be built using HTML5 and relying heavily on existing JavaScript frameworks like JQuery. Using existing opensource tools like PhoneGap, Newscaster could be packaged for the iOS and Android stores. It would connect with existing video sources like YouTube or individual news sources. This would avoid issues of hosting video and limit bandwidth demands. Existing social media services like Twitter, Facebook and Google would be used for media sharing. Because Newscaster is being built as a tablet application using open standards it can be easily expanded to smartphones and interactive TV platforms like GoogleTV, Roku or internet-enabled TVs.

Challenge

It may be difficult to convince content providers to participate. Without video from the best available news sources across a variety of topics, Newscaster will be no better than any individual news source. Nor will it compete with other aggregators like Google News, other non-news video sources or YouTube. Newscaster could share most advertising revenues — banner and interstitial video ads — with the content creators. Video creators would also have access to analytics about usage of their content — how many users, from where, what and how long they watched and, if known, basic demographics about the users.

User Experience

Newscaster presents a menu of timely video news stories (weather, sports, crime, education, etc.) from varied sources (ABC, CNN, Fox, ESPN, E!, etc.). The home screen encourages users to begin building a playlist but users can also select a single story to watch. Each video story lists its length and its creator’s logo.

As the user drags stories into Newscaster’s timeline, the clock reflects the total length of their newscast. Users can rearrange stories by dragging them around on the timeline. Or stories can be removed from the timeline by pressing and holding them until an ‘x’ appears in the in the top-left corner. When the user is ready to start watching their newscast they just touch the play button in the lower right hand corner. The screen will dim and a full-screen newscast will begin.

The user will see a short pre-roll ad, four to six seconds, followed by the stories they selected. If the newscast is longer than five minutes there will be one six to 12 second ad in the middle. And if the selected newscast is longer than ten minutes, the user would see a pair of ads evenly spaced out during the stories.

There are also three auto-generated playlists each with a different fixed length: three, five and ten minutes. Each fast paced newscast includes stories selected based on past use — if the person has used Newscaster previously. Or as a person repeatedly uses Newscaster, the program will suggest stories based on past use.

Oliver Reichenstein, owner and manager of Tokyo-based Information Architects (iA), emphasized the need to prototype with reasonable constraints during the third week of the Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab.

“HTML is a better design tool than anything else out there. The trouble with Indesign is that it renders text to beautifully. Fireworks renders type so badly that putting it in HTML is a pleasant surprise.”

This issue — what fidelity to strive for in prototypes — is critical because it is one of the key reasons to make hybrid apps. Once you are ready to touch the computer, it makes sense to prototype a hybrid or web app in HTML. “Paper is for sketching idea; the rest should happen in your real medium,” he said.

For news apps, ObjectiveC’s (the programming language for Apple’s iOS apps) and Java (the language of Google’s Android apps) encourage a richness of experience not necessarily needed for news consumption. Paper prototyping deliberately leaves open all kinds of possibilities but prototyping in motion-based tools, like Flash, risks introducing unnecessary functionality and visual distraction.

“Interaction design is mostly trying to reduce. No matter how thought-through your ideas are you will fail if your grids are not based on ad formats…” said Reichenstein. “…the article has one function: to be read. The article is the atom of news site.”

Reichenstein showed that subtracting the advertisements can make for a much stronger news experience. The user interaction is much cleaner, however, it ignores business logic. Still, the issue of economics is perhaps easier to solve than the problem of interaction. “UI is not eye and screen, it’s head and hand. News design is not about shaping surfaces but complex processes,” he said.

As I explore the potential of adapting Newscaster to mobile, tablet or even television screens the most critical issue is ensuring the success of the news consumption experience, in this case, watching a story. If the act of selecting a news video and watching it feels natural, an improvement on the remote control and television experience than Newscaster will work.

But the newscast and newspaper still end up looking the same for every customer — whether that news product is reaching several hundred or several million customers.

The promise of digital journalism is the possibility that every product is different, ‘designed’ specially for that user. Newscaster, the on-demand, user-driven video newscasts shown across a range of mobile and tablet devices must solve this problem to be successful. It is critical that the system derive a high degree of customization, but essential that the tool supply a highly-designed experience.

Jesse James Garrett explained how to design for a customizable user experience in the second week of the Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab.

“Rather than defining a singular experience, it’s about defining a rule set, parameters of a system by which customization happens. Lump of Clay vs a set of legos,” said Garrett. “Clay can create a complex, nuanced result but requires more skill. With Legos anyone can make anything right away. Lego set has rules by which pieces connect — scaffolding for users to simplify creation process. Shifts experience from delivery of a defined thing to delivering an embedded rule set.”

This concept of designing rules rather than shared, traditional visual experiences fits into Garrett’s much broader view of user experience design. He looks beyond the traditional roles of graphic artist and user experience designer to embrace higher level design thinking.

This framework allows the creation of sophisticated media design experiences — whether those experiences are singular, shared moments like those highly art directed digital stories produced by The Bold Italic or highly personalized and customized experiences like Flipboard offers to tablet users.

For a project like Newscaster to be a successful experience it will have to function successfully across Garett’s range of experience design. Creating a strategic experience framework that is similar for all users but with an incredibly flexible structure and skeleton that can adapt to the frictionless, content customization needed to fit news consumer’s needs and tastes.

Media companies primarily focus on manufacturing. This is not about the reporting, writing, editing and art direction. Rather is about how that information is distributed: broadcast news reports, radio shows, newspapers, magazines, websites and apps. Media companies rarely pushing their mediums. Instead they find templates, made by competitors or outsiders, and fill them with their branding and content. Newspaper designers mimic the work of other papers. Television graphics look interchangeable. And news apps look nearly identical.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s newspaper companies ‘discovered’ the value of designers. It took years, but newsrooms became comfortable with content designers determining the consumer experience. Most of these designers were focused on adding visual content layers. A few explored designing a better product experience — ‘redesigning’ the existing templates and styles. This kind of design greatly improved existing media products but lacked the transformative power of a simple, wooden prototype.

Because “first designs always suck,” according to Razkin, low fidelity prototypes are critical to exploring radical, new ideas. Media companies rarely, publicly explore radical or new ideas because they have trained themselves for a long, slow and expensive design process.

When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp wanted to design a new tablet news experience it took more than a year, cost millions and ended up with the wrong combination of familiar: “this is scarcely better than a free a paper” and unusable: “Is this the future of news? The app crashed the first time I ran it,” [iTunes App Store reviews]. Instead innovative companies like Nintendo use simple tools to prototype complex actions. A block of wood stood in for the complex Wii Controller. Even though it had no fancy gyroscopes or mechanics, it helped the designers replicate a new gaming experience.

Media companies need to take similar chances. Sunday’s New York Times explored the challenges of digital medical records. Stressing the importance of standards and widespread adoption, doctors argued for the role of design in medical records, “What scares me is design details mandated from on high,” said Mary Kate Foley, vice president of the user experience at Athenahealth. “That’s going to prevent me from making my electronic health records more usable. It will hurt innovation.” But more than that they fear that poorly designed standards would cripple the experience, “Usability is going to be the single greatest impediment to physician acceptance,” says Dr. Edward H. Shortliffe, a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston.

Unfortunately the New York Times, one of the countries’s leading news organizations, has not done much better in its presentation of this story. On Sunday the article, prominently featured in the printed paper, could be found on the front page of the news site — but not easily.

Razkin, imagines his job as using ideas to transform organizations and change what people think through prototyping. His kind of prototyping creates new kinds of functionality or imagines new experiences. He uses design to inspire participation — something sorely needed by media companies.

The journalism industry is changing at highway speeds. It is obvious that technology changes have reshaped the media landscape but it is not clear what those changes will mean and what direction they are headed. Medill is exploring these changes in several ways, including how programming and human centered design can radically change news creation, consumption and distribute. Using new methods, tools and techniques Medill faculty and students are experimenting with new ways to better reach audiences. Before you miss your exit come see what looms on the horizon.

In place of a newsroom programmed, linear newscast Newscaster is an on-demand, user-driven video newscasts across a range of mobile and tablet devices (like the iPad) using an accessible, cross-device programming standard. The digital newscast would take full advantage of web-native technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript, but will be developed within the intent of being a mobile app, aiming to make news easier to consume while on the go…

…The application will allow users to add content to their own playlist and make news judgment decisions traditionally reserved for professional producers in a control room. Users can have any kind of news (weather, sports, crime, education, etc.), can play their own newscast at any time (rather than waiting for 10 p.m.) or choose from a variety of automatically generated newscasts that fit the time they have at hand (10, 15, 30 minute newscasts)…

Please read the rest of the entry and vote for Newscaster.

About: Living Stories
Conveys the emotional impact of an unfolding news story through the voices of people involved and the powerful images that show the issues.

Project description
Given the name of a news event, like Libyan crisis, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan or the Wisconsin protests, this system finds news articles and extracts powerful quotes from the articles. It also finds relevant photos and displays them together in a news stream. Because the focus is on the experience of the story, anyone, news junkie or not, can dip into the stream without confusion.

Potential Audience
Living Stories can be used by news organizations — using just their exclusive content. This system can also be viewed by individual web users or displayed as an installation in a lobby or other public space.

Future work
Currently the stories are manually selected but the selection of stories could be automated. The stories could also be augmented through the use of a timeline — navigable by the user.

Student Team:

• Sarah Alsulaiman, Computer Science
• Phil Bencomo, Journalism
• Chandra Sekhar Bhagavatula, Computer Science
• Nick Pizzolato, Computer Science

Faculty Advisers:

• Larry Birnbaum, Computer Science
• Jeremy Gilbert, Journalism
• Kristian Hammond, Computer Science