PROJECT: Vox.com
PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION
Vox.com has built a loyal following of committed and engaged readers, and has had much success in leveraging the wisdom, experience, and curiosity of its readers to deepen its journalism. Vox is deeply committed to its audience – it’s explainer style journalism puts readers at the center of the reporting.
However, Vox’s participation callouts are decentralized across its verticals, and many readers weren't aware they could participate in Vox’s journalism, making these efforts limited to a small subset of Vox’s enormous audience.
THE ASK:
How can we make Vox’s audience engagement efforts more available and accessible to users in order to encourage more robust and routine participation when they visit Vox?
ROADMAP & WORKFLOW
Problem identification
Competitive analysis
Internal audit
User feedback
Prototype
SOLUTION:
The solution I came up with was the "Activity Hub": a centralized space for users to contribute their time, expertise, wisdom, experience and questions. Ultimately, this would take the shape of an independent page on Vox’s website which allows users to choose different ways to participate, shows them the impact of their contributions, and becomes a regular part of the way they interact with the website.
Role: Project Manager
Timeline: August - December 2021
For my graduate capstone, I partnered with the audience engagement team at Vox.com to help streamline their crowdsourcing efforts, make audience participation part of the user's routine when they enter Vox's site, and drive more robust engagement with Vox's journalism.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
During the competitive analysis phase of my project, I researched dozens of outlets around the world who have launched successful audience engagement, membership, and participation programs. I categorized them into a best practices list to look back on for inspiration when I was in the prototyping phase. In order to drive participation, I found that:
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Newsrooms are adopting ambassador programs and peer-to-peer relationships to help grow individual donations and contributor programs
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Rewarding audiences by acknowledging their contributions in published content encourages participation
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Establishing online and in-person relationships with audience members incentivizes participants to fund the journalism that provides them with a sense of community
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Soliciting feedback and collecting data from audiences makes contributors feel like a larger part of the journalism they support
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Centralizing crowdsourcing efforts on one page helps readers access content, understand how to contribute, and see the impact of their contributions
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Providing flexible options for audience members to participate expands the reach of contributions programs and has the potential to include casual readers in the process
INTERNAL AUDIT
During my inventory of Vox’s crowdsourcing initiatives, I looked across Vox.com’s verticals – including video, audio, and social media and their written content – to get a sense of what projects encourage user participation and how Vox’s audiences enjoys participating. I created a database of Vox’s initiatives and looked at quantitative and qualitative metrics to understand how Vox uses audience participation to help inform its journalism.
I found that Vox’s audience routinely respond to callouts to:
1) share life experiences, expertise, and to deepen Vox’s reporting with their knowledge across platforms
2) suggest ideas, editorial topics and areas to cover and submitting questions for Vox reporters to explore.
3) personal connections with journalists – Vox’s audience likes Q&As and personal connections to journalists, and they consistently express the desire for more of this content
I broke down this information and created different calls to action that could attract users to participate.
USER FEEDBACK
One of the most important steps of this project was sending out a user survey to get a sense of the pain points, opportunities, and gaps we could fill by creating the activity hub. With the help of my partners, I put out a survey which received over 1000 responses, and reached people in over 30 countries across the globe. I wanted to understand user behaviors, habits, and needs around engaging with Vox’s journalism. I asked Vox's audience whether they had participated in Vox’s journalism and why, what they enjoyed about participating, what could be changed to improve their experience, and what would encourage them to participate more, amongst many other questions. I analyzed and synthesized the quantitative and quantitative data and came away with six key takeaways, which I translated into physical features of the Activity Hub.
PROTOTYPING
For the final design phase, I tied together all four product phases into visual mock-ups of what the hub could look like. I used Vox’s fonts, color palettes, and the design flow of its various verticals to help inform the foundation of each wireframe.
Incorporating user feedback and competitive analysis, I added time stamps on the callouts, an email opt-in feature for receipt of participation and to create an avenue for users to receive emails about new opportunities, and a privacy policy clear on the page.
I also included different call out opportunities for the different kinds of users, and added a section where all user-generated content could live so the audience could visualize the impact of their participation efforts.
