about me!
NABUR
In-depth user research to redesign a neighborhood-centric online conversations platform that is moderated by local journalists
Duration
March - June 2023
Team
Greg Fitzpatrick
Tools
Miro, Figma, Zoom, FireFlies.ai, Google Suite, Calendly
Role
I am one of two UX researchers on the team, but I was responsible for the heuristic evaluation, competitive analysis, interview and design, journey mapping, and mid-fidelity prototyping.
👁 Overview
As a unique product that does not market itself as social media but rather as an exclusive, community-specialized communications platform, NABUR needs a high-level strategy to effectively serve its specific audiences. While updates to the desktop version (NABUR 2.5) currently prepare for launch, our research insights have revealed that redesign efforts must establish an onboarding process for new users, simplify the information architecture, and prioritize customization features. We came to these conclusions by helping stakeholders gain a deeper understanding of NABUR's typical users across all of its target communities.
What we did together: stakeholder and user interviews, customer satisfaction benchmarking, data synthesis, concept testing
Results
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Provided a data-driven high-level product strategy to forward NABUR development
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Established Wick Communications' first internal UX practices
Timeline
Although the project is still ongoing, Greg and I have met regularly with creative director Alessia Alaimo and digital director Sean Fitzpatrick to touch base on progress and collaborate. Since I have been working part time, this has been the general timeline of our work. In July, we also plan to conduct concept testing with Alessia's hi-fidelity prototypes and launch NABUR 2.5 by August.
What is NABUR?
NABUR (Neighborhood Assisted Bureau Reporting) is a social platform that was launched in 2020 by Wick Communications, a family-owned media company publishing in 11 states across the USA. It:
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Was a project funded by the Google News Initiative to fight misinformation, share resources and build a diverse and innovative news ecosystem.
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Aims to:
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Foster a sense of shared identity within neighborhoods in a unique and meaningful way
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Create a safe space for users to discuss both local events and general current news going on in the world
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Use accredited "journalist product managers" to moderate content and ensure that information is spread in a friendly and reliable manner.
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Build a "better news product" that gives their audience a seat at the table
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Who is NABUR's audience?
Currently, NABUR is only accessible to community members of 6 select towns that Wick owns newspapers in:
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Sierra Vista, AZ (Herald/Review Media)
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Sahuarita, AZ (Green Valley News)
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Green Valley, AZ (Green Valley News)
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Wenatchee, WA (The Wenatchee World)
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Montrose, CO (Montrose Press)
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Fergus Falls, MN (The Daily Journal)
There are 5 different versions of NABUR for each neighborhood*, and all the user interfaces are identical.
*Green Valley News serves two neighborhoods, GV itself and Sahuarita.
🔎 Research
Heuristic Analysis
To understand what possible pain points exist in the user interface to test for in usability tests, I evaluated the desktop version with Jakob Nielsen's 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design. Click the images below to expand!
Upon analysis, I noted that the platform lacked the most in consistency and standards (the "post" button does not look like a button = it's often overlooked and therefore impacts engagement in the long term), as well as help and documentation (the system does not guide new users through the interface).
External Secondary Research: Competitive Analysis
Additionally, I created a competitive analysis while recruiting for user interviews. My stakeholders had mentioned a few competitor products that they wanted to NABUR to function like in some aspects, so I charted out the successes of areas of improvement for Nextdoor and Facebook Groups against NABUR's.
From this, I learned that a key opportunity for NABUR to distinguish itself is to emphasize its use of locally-based professional Journalist Product Managers (JPMs), which are individually assigned to their respective NABUR platform to act as content moderator. Another opportunity is to prioritize improving and/or generating features that reflect NABUR's mission to maintain civilized and informed discussions between community members. Click the image below to expand!
User Interviews + Usability Tests
All user interviews and usability tests were conducted via Google Meet with the assistance of Fireflies.ai, an automated note taker for voice conversations.
Criteria
Given that NABUR is a niche product with a very small existing customer base, we chose to interview participants not based on whether or not they're current users, but rather on:
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Which NABUR-targeted community they live in
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Their familiarity with Wick's media & newspapers
We rewarded all participants with a $50 gift card.
Recruiting = 9 Participants
In the first round of interviews and tests, we were only able to recruit 5 participants. This is because our stakeholders provided us a cold list of survey respondents who had expressed interest in being usability testers for NABUR, so not many were responsive. On top of that, there were no-shows and generally gaps in the interview scheduling flow, which made recruiting efforts even more challenging.
By late April, stakeholders had provided a newer list of potential participants that were completely sourced from Sahuarita, which is technically a smaller community within the larger Green Valley township. We were able to interview 4 more participants throughout May.
1 participant = Sierra Vista
1 participant = Wenatchee
1 participant = Montrose +
1 participant = Fergus Falls
1 participant = Green Valley
4 participant = Sahuarita
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9 total participants
The Set Up: Each session was 1 hour, with the first 30 minutes for the interview to uncover the user's mental models towards NABUR and social media as a whole.
The last 30 was for the cognitive walkthrough. For this, users shared their screen and thought aloud as they:
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Log onto platform with provided information
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Navigate content on the main feed of the home page
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Identify CTAs (posting and commenting features)
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Explore the topic categories
We also showed all participants the respective marketing page for the NABUR platform associated to the community they reside in. Greg and I decided to show 4 of them the marketing page before the cognitive walkthrough, and 5 of them after. We did this to understand if whether or not users who used NABUR with an existing understanding of its features had impacted their perception of the platform.
Click the image to see an example marketing page!
What did we discover?
1) Users don’t see themselves as a core part of the NABUR experience, therefore have trouble navigating the interactive features.
All users already recognized Wick Communications as a media company via their respective town newspaper. However, not all of them knew what NABUR was. Therefore, those types of users initially assumed that NABUR was another news website to passively read - not a social platform to contribute content to.
It also didn't help that the posting button ("What's on your mind?") does not look like a standard button, and that its positioning on the page made it easy to glaze over.
Click my journey map, which I made to outline the main phases of a first time user navigating the platform. This visualizes where in the process that their challenges arose.
2) Over 90% of existing NABUR users are elderly, which explains their strong preference for desktop over mobile view, and their level of computer literacy skills
Through our interviews and the demographic data collected from the stakeholders' initial surveys, we discovered that our elderly users preferred to access NABUR via computer browser because it was harder to read the small text in mobile.
Also, many of them were living in nursing homes and had access to their own computers, which felt more natural to use compared to a phone app.
"I don't use the app because it's hard on my eyes and I have to pinch the screen all the time. Sometimes that doesn't work for some reason. The computer is easier because I know how to use mine."
- Don, Green Valley
3) Users think that "Journalist Product Managers" and NewsGuard sound credible in preventing misinformation, but the platform does not give them enough context as to why users should trust in these sources.
About 40% of users expressed concern over the role of JPMs, mostly because they did not know what that title meant at first. Moreover, it was because when they noticed the role badges by the JPM's names, they realized that the badges alone provided no context to any JPM's professional background, and were therefore hesitant to completely rely on them.
Also, 2/5 users who were shown the NABUR marketing page before the cognitive walkthrough mentioned they were completely unfamiliar with NewsGuard. Users who looked at it after noticed there was no background information on NewsGuard anywhere on NABUR. This is because the marketing page is the only place that contains information about NewsGuard.
"Now NewsGuard… it’s introducing something new here and then it describes all link posts on NABUR will automatically have a rating by NewsGuard. So this is an unknown organization to me. I'm not certain what their job is here. I would be interested in knowing what their credibility is to rate the credibility. Suspicious nature these days with the medias of all types. ” - Evan, Wenatchee
"I know what a journalist is and a product manager, but I've never heard of a role being both...seems good to have though, but how do I know they're just another guy spreading their own opinions on here...Their badge says Community Moderator. Is that the same thing?" - Elizabeth, Sahuarita
4) There is no foolproof way to verify a user's relationship or residency to a NABUR-served community when they sign up.
Technically, anyone can find the sign up/log in portal for any NABUR platform via search engine, but the intended users are those who are both Wick customers and are residents of a NABUR community. The current users had direct access to NABUR solely through Wick media (emails and official website posts).
However, users may still have to physically ensure that they signed up for the correct NABUR platform that is representative of their own neighborhood. This is because there are currently no measures in place to confirm the new user's residential status.
Once signed on through a one-time emailed code, the user is permanently on their account. Meaning, there is no way to log out.
5) Topic category filters are easy to find and use, but deliver unexpected results.
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Many categories deliver no results and there is no empty state text to explain the lack of results to users.
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Some categories deliver results that don’t seem to fit the category and there is no quick way to understand why a post was assigned to a category (highlighted keywords, selected topic, etc.)
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Users felt that some categories were random or too specific that it immediately turned them off because it seemed irrelevant to their interests.
🔨 Recommendations via Prototyping
Rough Designs
After synthesizing the user data, I prototyped a mid-fidelity UI to show our creative director the new features and layout I had envisioned for the NABUR 2.5 desktop rollout. Not only that, I also included additional page designs to the official NABUR informational website , which provided better general context about the product itself. In the NABUR prototype, I designed the following features according to user need:
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New NABUR sign up/log in flow directly from the official NABUR website
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An optional "tour" to onboard new users
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Modified profile page
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Larger color-coded badges for role titles
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Renamed category menu
These designs are still being experimented on as of right now - click this link to see the updated Figma file!
🔎 JPM Interviews
NABUR's other users - Journalist Product Managers
JPMs are the "back end" users that keep NABUR running. Because engagement is low as it is, they're not only logging in daily to check for content to fact check or respond to, but are creating content as well. After speaking to 4 JPMs and the 2 Editors who help out with JPM responsibilities, I discovered the following information:
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JPMs do not have a standard set of rules to follow to appropriate moderate content.
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NABUR has posting guidelines that require all users to agree to before accessing the platform. For the sake of fairness and transparency, JPMs have expressed a need for their own in order to successfully uphold the responsibilities of their role - they don't want to constantly have to "follow their gut"
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The reason why NABUR's current category names exist is because of "Community Resources", who are regular users that JPM's recognized as having areas of expertise and made them content creators for their respective category.
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Right now, there are no consistent Community Resources across all 5 NABURs. It's assumed that rebuilding a solid relationship between JPMs and CRs by promoting the need for CRs will help evenly distribute the effort the create content between the two roles.
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JPM's are concerned about announcing NABUR 2.5 updates to their users, because they might not address all the core complaints that they've heard from their users
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For example, JPMs noted that many of their users expressed dissatisfaction when the prior update (NABUR 2.0) took away the ability to use GIFs and still didn't provide video embedding as a posting feature.
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⏭ Next Steps
Benchmarking via Customer Satisfaction Score
While also conducting interviews with the JPMs, I was coordinating with our digital director to launch a customer satisfaction survey across all NABUR platforms and to benchmark our current users overall satisfaction with the product. I have already created the survey and it is ready to distribute, but I am waiting on logistics to provide an incentive for users to respond so that they will be entered into a raffle to win a gift card.
Concept Testing with Finalized Prototypes Before Launch
After our creative director rolls out a finalized design that incorporates the UI recommendations form my mid-fidelity prototypes, I plan to test it with current users and make adjustments accordingly before officially launching NABUR 2.5
