Tagged: storify

Ocqur – Reflections on user testing and the future

If you’ve ever built a product from scratch, you’ll inevitably have come up against the dilemma of whether to build it until you think it’s perfect before releasing it to users, or making a minimum viable product that ticks a few boxes and lets the users dictate the next iteration.

The latter is the approach we took with Ocqur, which is liveblogging software that I’ve been working on with Jonathan Frost and Andrew Fairbairn.

I’ve been overseeing the first round of user testing since we started building the service at the beginning of the year. It’s been really educational and also thrilling to see it being used outside of our small circle, so I  thought I’d post a few thoughts about lessons learnt and what we’re planning for the future.

Structuring feedback is really tough

Early testers of Ocqur have been giving us feedback over the testing period. Some emailed me their thoughts, others blogged or tweeted about it, but testers were also required to fill out a questionnaire I’d written.

The difficulty in providing a useful arena for feedback lies in getting an equal balance of serendipity and structure that allows you to get specific metrics. For example – you write a question that asks the tester “Which feature is the most important for Ocqur? A, B, or C?” What if there’s a “D” that you haven’t thought of? The tester might have “D” in mind as the most important feature, but you’re not giving them the option to suggest it.

I think I managed to get the balance fairly well – so we’ve got a workable set of percentages and figures regarding questions that can be answered with a yes or no, as well as long form feedback that’s the result of more free choice questions.

There is a gap in the market

When we set out to build Ocqur, we saw it as an opportunity to create a liveblogging system that was simple but powerful and married good design to nice functionality. A lot of the feedback we got from testers was that they were surprised and pleased with how simple the product was.

I’ve had some people ask me about the comparisons to Storify, and how to differentiate it from their offering.

To ask that kind of question is to miss the point a little. Storify is a great tool – I use it frequently. But it’s not what we’re after. Publishing a Storify “as live” requires the user to constantly republish the page (which doesn’t automatically refresh if you’re a viewer) and inevitably constantly notify viewers that updates have been made. It works so much better to collect thoughts after an event has happened.

We think that liveblogging shouldn’t be as complicated as it has been in the past. We think the current offerings are either poor or unaffordable to the majority of  bloggers, freelance and student journalists. Luckily at this early stage it seems like our testers felt the same.

People interpret features in different ways

The reason we decided to release to testers so early in development is because we didn’t want to spend another 10 weeks building something only to find out that no one wanted it. User input at this early stage was vital.

At the same time, it’s interesting when testers throw up something that you really didn’t think would be a big issue. For us this was being able to upload content from your desktop onto a liveblog.

I have never done this, having worked with pretty much all the consumer liveblogging services out there. I tend to scrape content from various web sources, and if I need to take any photos from my phone for a liveblog I either post to Twitter or share to Dropbox.

But clearly our testers want this feature, and they’ve voted overwhelmingly with their feet.

A breakdown of testers' views on the importance of desktop uploading

So now the question is, what do they use it for? Documents? Audio? Video?

Asking users to rank the importance of desktop upload may seem fairly specific, but in reality people may have all sorts of ideas of why it’s important to them and what they actually want. To that end I’m going to chat to those people who ranked it as very important individually and dig a bit deeper into why it’s an important feature.

The future

We had an overwhelming response when we put out a call for testers – over double the amount of registrations that we needed for the first stage. If you’ve signed up and haven’t been contacted this time round, don’t worry – we’ll be sending out another iteration of the software in the next couple of months and you’ll be the first ones to get your hands on it.

A big thank you to everyone who’s participated so far, we’re really looking forward to sharing our plans for Ocqur with you in the months ahead.

Review: Storify iPad app

Earlier this morning, Storify announced that they were releasing a free iPad app. I’ve downloaded it, and these are my first impressions.

The app works in landscape mode only. Getting to the login screen means typing in your username and password – slightly confusing for me because I’ve always logged in via twitter since the beta version. Having tried all the possible iterations of my twitter password I then had to do a password reset to my email in order to get in – this might just be me being forgetful, but those of you who’ve associated your twitter account with Storify may also hit this problem.

Anyway once you’re in you get access to all your Storify stories in a nice gallery view. You can edit them all from here, but I thought I’d create a short story just for this review.

The page for composing your story is similar enough, with the familiar tabs of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr and browser links available for you to run searches in.

The only difference between the desktop version is that there isn’t a tab for Google content, which normally pulls out web searches, news and images. I never use that tab, but worth bearing in mind.

Once you tap on any of these, it’s very much like the desktop version. You can filter tweets by user, search and images, and the drag and drop interface makes it really easy to quickly create the story. Interestingly the iPad app also has one feature that the desktop version doesn’t – the ability to tweet from your own account while inside the app.

Pulling content from Flickr and YouTube is similarly pain-free, once you’ve run a search just pick up a piece of content by tapping and holding and then moving it over to the desired area on your story.

I can see the iPad app being incredibly useful for a couple of reasons.

The first obvious one is conference use. iPads are already ubiquitous at conferences – they’re better for tweeting and note taking than a smartphone without being as cumbersome as a laptop.

But because the iPad app’s drag and drop interface is so intuitive, you’d easily be able to collect together content in the break between a conference session. I’ve already written a few blog posts entirely in Storify, and I think this will only increase that trend.

The second obvious use is news coverage combined with mobile journalism. If you’re out and about covering an event with your smartphone – taking photos, video, livetweeting, it’s now really easy to just sling an iPad in your bag for some post-event curation in a nearby coffee shop. Again, getting rid of that laptop.

Once you’ve finished your story, you’re presented with the publish screen which thankfully has all the functionality of the desktop app – publishing to Facebook and Twitter, and the ability to @ reply anyone who’s been quoted in your story.

Maybe the announcement wasn’t as big as some people were expecting. It wasn’t an acquisition like some were predicting, but the Storify iPad app stands on its own two feet.

It has a few bugs (it crashed several times when swiping between stories) but that’s to be expected from an app that’s just been released.

In the long run this’ll mean only good things for Storify – capturing a particularly savvy audience of content creators while they’re on the move and giving people yet another reason to ditch their laptops in favour of an iPad when they’re covering events.

Here’s my finished story that I made on my iPad in about 5 minutes:

 

Sky News’ Social Media Policy – It’s not archaic, it’s just a new approach

By now you’re all likely to be aware of Sky News making significant changes to their employees’ social media usage via an email to staff last Tuesday.

In this week’s Media Mouthwash podcast I called the policy “anti-web”, but I’ve deliberately left it this long before writing something about it because I think it’s a much more nuanced issue than some dissenting voices have made out.

Don’t tweet when it’s someone else’s story

This is probably the most galling aspect of the policy. If an employee isn’t particularly social media-savvy, then there’s no harm in another journalist using Twitter and other networks to promote and share their content in a way that means it’ll get maximum exposure.

If I was the only person sharing my own work around Twitter, then it’d get very limited traction, and there’s no harm in staff helping get extra eyeballs onto a colleague’s piece.

Always pass breaking news lines to the news desk before posting them on social media networks

There is fundementally nothing wrong with this. If we’re acknowledging that Twitter is a medium like any other, and one that should sit alongside videos, blogs and audio reports amongst Sky News’ output, then it makes sense that it should be properly integrated with the news desk.

Communication with the desk is essential in order to make the news operation an efficient one. I don’t have a lot of experience with them, but I can’t imagine the vast majority of news editors being too happy with a journalist breaking a story on Twitter and then strolling over and telling the desk about it a few minutes later.

Breaking news without context on Twitter holds little or no value for the journalist or his/her audience in itself. The value comes from using Twitter as the start of a narrative.

When I was covering the bomb blasts and shootings in Oslo, I started by using Storify to collect information and photos about events in the city centre. Then when people became aware of the shootings, I moved to turning my Twitter feed into one dedicated to covering new developments.

My follower count didn’t rise because I was constantly breaking new information on Twitter, but because I was able to organise it more efficiently into an understandable narrative than others covering it at the time. I didn’t retweet everything I saw, I thought carefully about how people following me would be able to easily understand what was happening.

Breaking news in itself holds little value – were my parents really any the worse for getting the full picture of the London riots on Newsnight rather than watching it unfold in real time on Twitter?

Passing lines to the news desk before tweeting makes good sense in a large organisation because the news desk is the hub that controls their coverage. They can distribute information to correspondents, multimedia specialists and graphics teams.

The ego of a single journalist itching to grab a bit of social media limelight should be able to bow to the collective nature of a news operation in order to strengthen its overall coverage. As Martin Belam notes, “being first really mattered when your rivals had a 24 hour print cycle before they could catch up”.

If anything, this shows that Sky would like to step away from the “never wrong for long” tag that indicates they’re happy to be wrong as long as they correct themselves quickly.

The BBC are rarely quicker than Sky when it comes to breaking news, but hold far more trust because they seem to pride context and verification much more. Is it a bad thing that Sky want to move toward this model more? I don’t think so.

Do not retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter.

This is slightly more problematic, but I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s removing the social from social media. As a Sky News employee, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to cover Oslo or the riots in the way that I did if I’d adhered to this rule.

However, if you look at the social media usage of many journalists, they primarily use it as a promotional, rather than as a news gathering tool. Sky News’ new social media policy does not stop journalists from seeking out sources on Twitter, or finding photos that can be later added to strengthen news coverage. There are lots of journalists with big followings on Twitter, but only a fraction of them seem to use social media to actually dig things out and add another aspect to traditional sources.

If anything, the whole debate seems to be a microcosm of the divide that often seeks to engulf any rational discussion about online journalism. That is, if you don’t agree entirely with the popular view of mainstream media persistently “not getting it”, then you’re old news, you’re irrelevant, or Victorian.

I think it’s important to understand that there are many shades of grey – what works for Sky News wouldn’t work for Tech Crunch and vice versa. This policy is neither surprising nor as draconian as some commentators have implied – what’s more interesting will be observing if it becomes indicative of Sky News’ shift to a markedly different kind of news provider.