Young Seattle & Local News

My team partnered with The Seattle Times to research the challenge of growing subscription relationships with young Seattle. We identified design opportunities, and developed a three-month research plan.

We designed and left culture probes with millenial participants, and explored the results with journalists in a design workshop.

Drawing from our research insights, I built a journey map to guide our final design.

Nobody is sure what makes a welcomed news experience today.

The Seattle Times is passionate about creating meaningful reader engagement. But analytics don't give them the reader information they feel they need to provide relevant, actionable news.

Readers want to want news, but mobile formats challenge their ability to develop relationships with professional news sources. Caught between interests and convenience, they have difficulty defining an engaging news experience.

As we interviewed Seattle Times staff members, this quote came up again and again. Their subscriber base was aging. They wanted to serve a younger, digital, and more diverse audience, but lacked strategies.

What would it take to connect the newsroom with young Seattle?

Research led us to three design opportunities:

Over the next three months we’ll ideate and prototype in these opportunity areas, leading to a complete design specification for The Seattle Times.

My team conducted a literature review and competitive assessment to understand the state of digital journalism. The Seattle Times shared audience analytics and past reports. We built forward from this data to choose our primary research methods.

Recruiting Young Seattle

As we began interviews with Seattle Times journalists, we recruited nine millennial research participants. We distributed invitation cards through friends and family, at coffee shops, and at local concerts.

We wanted to learn what interested young Seattelites about their local environment, and how they organically encountered these things in their daily life.

Culture probes are a technique for uncovering the unspoken attitudes and needs of a local culture. Researchers leave participants with creative artifacts, designed to provoke equally creative response.

Out of the box

We constructed white, laser-cut boxes with 6 colored envelopes. Each envelope held a 10 minute activity. Our culture probes were designed to be:

My team put a lot of thought into our probes, iterating each interaction until we felt we could tell the right story.

Each activity interrogated specific questions.

For example, the “Color Your City” activity gathered participants’ attitudinal and informational relationships to different parts of the city.

We led a design workshop with Seattle Times staff members. Each person focused on the results from a different culture probe box, and discussed how creating news for this specific reader would change their processes.

Together with the staff, we categorized what we learned about young Seattleites based on knowns and unknowns.

After wrapping primary research, we drew insights from our data by coding categories and connections across all our participants.

Next steps

My team begins ideation and prototyping this summer.

As we brainstorm and narrow down design concepts over the next few months, our first decision point is whether to design for either the Seattle Times staff or readers as our primary population.

Prototypes will increase in fidelity as we build toward a product video, full design specification, and high resolution mobile prototype.