News apps: how to make your audience care about your data

[ ID ] e62a12b7-e59c-4faf-86d9-3b98b6c6106f

[ Submitter's Name ] Lam Vo

[ Submitter's Twitter ] lamthuyvo

[ Space ] journalism [ Secondary Space ] localisation

[ Format ] learning-lab, fireside, hands-on

Description

Imagine you’ve spent months, maybe even a few years putting together hugely important data sets. Now, you have to figure out how to enthuse your audiences with that data. The solution? Build a news app!

But this last crucial step needs as much care and effort as your data gathering. News apps need to go beyond merely dumping large data sets into a searchable tool and help audiences find themselves and their personal stories in the data.

But how do we design engaging news apps that tell the stories of you and me? We will present, discuss and gather techniques and technologies for data personalization in this session.

Agenda

We’ll start out talking about examples of news apps that convey personal stories well and discuss the structure, the visual design and design decisions that were possibly made in process of designing the pieces.

Through this discussion we will identify a number of patterns and thereby learn about strategies in finding and hooking an audience to a complicated data set. We will look at various ways to make data relevant to audiences — search bars, data visualizations (comparisons, timelines, etc.) and personalized sharing — and give participants a structured list of techniques and technologies they can use for their own apps.

They will then do a hands-on brainstorm session with projects that are either given to them or that they brought themselves to see how they can use the techniques detailed above for their projects. At the end of the session, teams will present a paper prototype.

Participants

This session is a mix of lecture and workshop and very scalable. We can assign three participants three projects, which they will each present; or we can assign groups of 3 or groups of 5 a project and they can come up with a paper prototype in groups.

The paper prototype is something that gives everyone — technically advanced and less advanced people — a way of participating in story creation, something dear to my heart.

The last few slides from this workshop exemplify how paper prototypes worked well in other settings: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1mrY-L1l6gHRR5GsNxZQkvx2jyDdOHcNp53gTq2Q8KVw/edit?usp=sharing

Outcome

Personalization is becoming a bigger and bigger weapon in vying for people's attention. But beyond storytelling, I'd love to have the discussion continue after the conference, specifically around ethical and security issues connected to personalization (what data gets stored, how do we access data, etc.).

We will form a slack channel specifically for personalization in the newsnerdery.slack.com community and continue to exchange thoughts on the subject there.

We will also create a Github repository for documenting the outcome of the session

MozillaFoundation / mozfest-program-2016