The problem

News is a very important service provided by the CBC, but what our audience needs when they come to us for digital news was not something we knew much about. Although we’d learned a bit about behaviours surrounding news consumption on our platforms in other past studies, we’d never had the space to conduct discovery work about our digital news audience specifically. Recognizing a gap in our knowledge base, content designer Tara Kimura and I decided to take on a 20% project to understand how our editorial and product decisions align with our news audience’s needs. Understanding this would allow CBC to make content and product changes to better serve the needs of our digital news audience.

What we did

We first had to identify the needs of our digital news audience. In order to do this, we took on a mixed method approach. We conducted in-depth interviews with users from across the country. We asked them questions about their daily routines, how they consume news, why they chose CBC news, and more. We also ran a diary study with a different set of participants. Participants filled out surveys once a day for three days, answering questions about their routines & things they read that day. Finally, we ran a week long survey with a larger sample of users, asking them questions about how they consume news, what types of stories interest them, and more. From this research, we analyzed and coded the results, and led a series of workshops with our product and editorial colleagues to define the needs. We emerged with 5 strong and well-defined news user needs.

From there, we performed a content audit in order to assess if the news stories published met the needs of our digital news users. We worked with data scientists to pull a list of news stories that appeared during a two week period. We then read and bucketed the stories according to the user needs defined in our research and mapped that against analytics. From this audit, we learned that the news stories published during this period of time featured stories that serve two of the user needs the most. We also learned that there were other user needs that were underserved but performed highly.

We also worked with our product and design teams to perform a product audit. We mapped user flows for all five of our user needs and also catalogued the design elements on our news website and app. This allowed us to see how our products were, or weren’t, serving our 5 user needs and assess what gaps might exist within our products. We learned that our products were more easily and more deliberately serving only a couple of our user needs but less so the remaining needs.

The outcome

This is an ongoing project that is being used across the organization. When it was first completed, we had the opportunity to present it to many different groups across CBC, including the executive group. We were met with a lot of praise and interest and have already seen it being implemented in workflow changes. Most notably, the digital news team is using it to inform their story assignments — making sure they have a balance of stories each day that serve all 5 needs. We’re continuing to work with our product and editorial colleagues to expand and grow this project and are currently in the process of launching a second phase of this work (so more to come!).

Example Artifact: User Experience Map

Although there are a number of interesting visuals and artifacts from this project, not a lot of them can be shared at this point. However, this is an example of an experience map created for one of the user needs. I made these to show how our news users traverse our products when trying to fulfill their needs. These helped visualize gaps and opportunities within our news products.