Introducing VERITI – the future of authentic journalism

Informed by our primary goal, the secondary goals for this Sprint included the following:

• Define our project stakeholders
• Understand potential platform users
• Develop an understanding of project context (ideally OSINT, media literacy) from relevant people
• Understand the existing platform landscape
• Identify initial risks, challenges, and obstacles

Our team’s first trip to Hilversum Media Park

Our research methods for this sprint were both varied and highly collaborative. Using the DSS Design Method Toolkit and some methods used by members in our team, we engaged with the following in our Sprint 1 research:

Amir and OB holding our card sorting cards.

• WWWWWH – who, what, when, where, why, how?
• Literature review of ‘OSINT’ and ‘media literacy’
• Stakeholder mapping
• Interviews (experts and users)
• Empathy mapping
• Persona development
• Competitor audit
• Dark Side
• Card sorting (co-creation research)

Through interviews, literature reviews, stakeholder and persona mapping and many more activities, we have built a foundational understanding of our civilian platform users, broader stakeholders, and our next avenues for further research.

For our research in this Sprint, we first employed stakeholder mapping, a literature review, and the WWWWWH activity. These sessions helped us to get a more clear understanding of the ‘Wicked Problem’ that informs our project brief, and the complex landscape behind our platform. Here, our lesson learned involved refining scope – after all, to a certain extent the news can impact everyone and everything!

Up next, we engaged with several interviews. We sought expertise in the areas of OSINT and user research for our Translate session, and proceeded to conduct 12 interviews with potential platform users. We spoke to people from here in the Netherlands to Iran and as far away as Australia. This global feedback will be key for us to ensure our platform design can accommodate users from all over the world. These interviews helped us to define some further research questions as well.

Following the interviewing process, we conducted our empathy mapping and persona design. From this, two platform ‘users’ emerged – a digital news consumer, and a knowledge holder. They are primarily differentiated by their ability and likelihood to research information independently and share with others. We will continue to refine these personas through future sprints.

An example of a user persona developed in this sprint

We also conducted a Competitor Audit of seven platforms. This included creating a matrix to compare and contrast existing relevant platforms in the landscape, their strengths, their weaknesses, the demographics, and more. Through this, we concretely identified where in the platform landscape within which VPROSINT sits, as well as an understanding of which features we may wish to include or avoid.

Finally, we flipped our problem-solving brains on their heads to engage with the Dark Side exercise. This entailed listing as many potential challenges and obstacles as we could think of relating to our platform, and then identifying potential solutions. We found three possible solutions to challenges that were informed by our research through the sprint. We also devised a co-creation user research activity from our Dark Side brainstorming, which we used with our partner in our Sprint Review session to refine the scope of our Sprint 2 research.

VPRO engaging with our card sorting exercise

Informed by our primary goal, the secondary goals for this Sprint included the following:

• Understand best practice for digital, journalistic co-creation
• Identify potential legal/privacy concerns and how they come about
• Develop definitions and understanding of key terms in our project
• Further define platform users
• Preliminary research into possible ways of content moderation, and evaluation of trust and security

Building on some existing research methods from Sprint 1, we expanded our project understanding and drilled down on key insights. We engaged with the following in our Sprint 2 research:

• Literature review of ‘co-creation’ and ‘community moderation’
• Translating our stakeholder map into an actors map
• Conceptual mapping
• Refining personas 1 (citizen journalist) and 2 (critical researcher)
• Creating our third persona (media maker) through interviews, empathy mapping, and persona profile development
• Mapping of our persona Venn diagram to understand user interaction
• Audit of relevant existing platform features and SWOT analysis
• Boundary shifting activity (to tackle the issue of trust in anonymous collaboration)
• Co-discovery and co-creation

Conceptual map

A deeper dive into our platform research brought us many insights around our user personas, establishing trust, legal challenges, the fundamentals of co-creation.

Building from our first sprint, we finally defined our three main platform users, and what differentiates them in order to learn how they may collaborate and co-create. These are citizen journalists, critical researchers, and media makers.

Persona Venn Diagram

We discovered an abundance of existing platforms working towards the same goal as our project brief. This indicates to us that there is significant existing interest in creating a similar online space. Notably, PubHubs platform features had significant overlap with our platform needs, and we will explore this further in Sprint 3.

Platform feature map

Through our translate sessions, we identified key legal considerations for VPRO moving forward and we discovered more about the salience of co-creation facilitation. Moving forward, we will need to consider exactly what facilitation looks like on our platform in a digital co-creation capacity.

We concluded that trust, transparency, and facilitation of co-creation must be both prioritised and embedded within the platform infrastructure

Informed by our primary goal, the secondary goals for this Sprint included the following:

• Identify and brainstorm features that enable global access and participation
• Extend ideas and experiment more with co-creation in order to better understand platform user interactions
• Ideate anonymity and security features that complement co-creation and collaboration

Our team with VPRO at the Sprint 3 review

With a mix of familiar and brand new methodologies, we explored our hypotheses and built a number of low-fidelity prototypes. We engaged with the following in our Sprint 3 research:

• Using formalised brainstorming methods like the Dark Side and Lotus Blossom for ways to influence global engagement with our platform
• Creating a morphological chart to better understand relevant platform features and concepts, combining them in innovative ways through the Mash Up activity

Lotus Blossom and Mash Up

• Co-discovery and paper prototyping of our co-creation activity to simulate platform interaction
• Backcasting to project our ideal platform anonymity and security features in future, and retroactively finding a pathway to this objective
• Prototype for empathy for our platform users to align our research with user persona security needs
• Concept sketch or wireframe produced to show basic platform pages

Wireframe pages

Our preliminary prototyping helped our team to understand the nature of our project more deeply. Most of our activities conducted through this sprint were used to inform our main Sprint outputs – a co-creation prototype, and a platform wireframe.

Tackling the challenge of digital co-creation head on presented many roadblocks, but we were able to simulate a news-building activity and engaged our user personas to work together and investigate a news story in a digital sandbox.

Co-creation Miro board

However, a key insight we discovered through the process of engaging various user personas in this co-creation activity relates to the challenge of onboarding one critical user cohort. Citizen journalist outreach to those in countries with limited freedom of expression presents an ongoing issue for our team. Engaging citizen journalists in an activity like this proved extremely difficult, and this has implications for onboarding them to the platform in future. Moving forward and as we continue user testing, we seek to present potential solutions to this challenge.

More insights we gained from the digital co-creation activity included user atomisation, and the need for clear and accessible processes and structures. Further prototyping will address these user needs.

Andrea, Abel, and William, the three participants in our co-creation activity

We also presented our wireframe platform layout to VPRO, including our home page, news forum pages, and we demonstrated how users can search for and explore news topics on the platform. We received positive feedback, and have taken a few notes from our project partners to implement as we progress with our prototyping.

Informed by our primary goal, the secondary goals for this Sprint included the following:

• Develop an interactive ‘NewsRoom’/model of the co-creation space
• Generate ideas about the ambassador program
• Prepare for the DSS showcase

The methodologies we implemented in Sprint 4 were ones to help us create and verify our prototypes, as well as prepare effectively for the upcoming showcase.

• Translate sessions to further understand the UX/UI components of our prototype, and how to best test these with users
• Co-discovery to generate our final prototype ideas
• Co-creation sessions to innovate our existing designs and ensure they are fit for purpose
• Prototyping for empathy in order to align our final deliverables with the needs of our user personas
• In person user testing to validate aspects of our platform, including a session at the Public Pioneers event in Groningen on 28 May

User testing of our wireframe in Groningen

• A user survey to test our co-creation prototype widely among our user personas
• A user journey exercise and interviews to prepare an ambassador plan, which will facilitate effective global outreach for citizen journalists
• Campaigning, videography, and storytelling as methods to prepare our final showcase promotional materials and booth

Sprint 4 review with VPRO – user testing on our clickable prototype

On the home stretch of our project, we locked in the idea for our final platform design prototype. This includes a clickable platform Figma prototype, and a model with accompanying guidelines for co-creation on our platform. We will also deliver a companion document for our ambassador program proposal.

Our user testing for our platform involved assigning basic tasks for people to complete on our platform wireframe, including finding a particular news co-creation page and adjusting pseudonymous account settings. The way that users approached these tasks, and the subsequent questions we posed, allowed us to collect data on the user experience and to assess how well we were meeting their priorities and needs. 

Based on the feedback we received in our user testing and the interim results from our user survey, we have identified some key feedback points to refine our prototype ahead of our final project deadline. Some of these points relate to visibility of aspects of other users’ participation on the platform, for example something like a community-generated trust score. Other feedback shared included positive sentiments relating to site navigation and the ability to share information, as well as the privacy options with pseudonymous accounts. 

Team dinner after Sprint 4 review

Our Sprint 5 goals remained largely the same as Sprint 4, and included the following:

• Develop an interactive ‘NewsRoom’/model of the co-creation space
• Finalise user testing for our model of co-creation, and produce accompanying guidelines
• Prepare for the DSS Showcase on June 26

Presenting at our final Sprint Review with VPRO

The methodologies we implemented in Sprint 4 were ones to help us create and verify our prototypes, as well as prepare effectively for the upcoming showcase.

• Co-discovery to generate our final prototype ideas
• Co-creation sessions to innovate our existing designs and ensure they are fit for purpose
• Finalising the user survey to test our co-creation prototype widely among our user personas
• Campaigning, videography, and storytelling as methods to prepare our final showcase promotional materials and booth
• Iterative prototyping to develop ideas for our DSS Showcase installation

A sketch of our floorplan for the DSS Showcase

We concluded Sprint 5 with some fantastic insights and some exciting ideas to present our project at the DSS Showcase.

In finalising our user testing, we fine tuned our model for digital co-creation with more of our personas and with proxy users. We found that the model is successful in allowing users to generate their own ideas while still facilitating collective intelligence-gathering, research, and analysis.

We also discovered that it was necessary to be clear about the criteria VERITI will use to develop the trust score with users from their onboarding to the platform, and we created an outline for this, which we presented at the DSS Showcase.

Our DSS Showcase booth

The focal point of the Showcase was a physical construction of our ‘NewsRoom’, where those attending could physically interact with user posts and images by moving them onto a physical NewsRoom feed. At the end of this process, we asked participants to vote on what they believe to be the most likely outcome of the news story that was presented in the NewsRoom.

Our physical ‘NewsRoom’ feed

We also collected data on their news habits and behaviours through a string board visualisation, and presented our clickable Figma prototype.

Our clickable Figma prototype

We found that people were very engaged with our Showcase installation, and it was a great way to engage with more feedback and field questions around the nature of the project and its potential future.

If you have any questions about VERITI or the team, you can contact any of us via LinkedIn! Our profiles are linked below.

Naz Mirsharifi

Izzy Lyndon-James

Amir Ghamdideh

Gabriel (OB) Torgbor-Ashong