Designing for the emergent needs of immersive journalists
Overview
Role: User Experience Researcher
Project Type: Foundational and Secondary UX Research
Duration: 3 months
Team: Myself (sole UX Researcher), 2 UX Designers, 6 advisors
Context: My team expressed interest in designing a product for immersive journalists, and was looking for guidance on how to proceed in that design process.
Contribution: Led development of initial problem space, conducted secondary research, and formative research development. Led my team through study moderation, qualitative analysis, insight development, and results share-out.
Impact: Insights from this research informed my design team’s ideation process for product development, as well as the basis of our team’s design principles.
Problem Space
The Extended Reality (XR) industry is expected to grow from $43 billion in 2020 to $333 billion by 2025. With this growth, disruption is predicted in complementary industries, such as Journalism. Little is known, however, about how journalists are currently engaging with these technologies, including what pain points they are experiencing, their goals in making immersive journalistic media, and what opportunities they perceive for this emerging field.
A moment from “Hunger in Los Angeles”, an immersive VR journalistic experience by Nonny de la Peña
TL;DR
Through secondary and primary research, I explored how immersive journalists define their roles, what projects they take on (and the pain points they resultantly encounter), and what goals they hold for their work.
From this research, I derived three main takeaways:
Immersive creators are motivated to leverage XR to unlock deeper means of generating connection, because stories struggle when they cannot get audiences to connect.
An immersive creator’s priority is engagement in service of their message, not engagement for engagement's sake.
Immersive creators care about the success of their work in relation to traditional journalistic goals, such as availability, engagement, and clarity.
Secondary Research
Before investing in formative research, I wanted to understand what we could learn about immersive journalists from existing literature and media, including:
the historical precedent for immersive journalism
how the journalistic industry defined immersive journalism, as a role
Research Questions
Who are these immersive journalists? Do they differ from ‘regular’ journalists?
Where do they work? Are they independent contributors or embedded in teams?
What are journalists using XR for in immersive journalism today?
How is their storytelling process affected by immersive technologies?
To investigate these questions, I conducted a landscape analysis and literature review.
Landscape analysis Results
What we learned:
Who are these immersive journalists? Do they differ from ‘regular’ journalists?
A: ‘Immersive journalist’ is not a commonly held title—instead, people can hold a range of titles, from ‘Journalist’ to ‘Virtual Media Consultant’
Where do they work? Are they independent contributors or embedded in teams?
A: There’s a lot of variance. Immersive journalists work in dedicated departments, newsrooms, and as independent contributors. Some are embedded into workflows, while others maintain consultancy roles. (See visual mapping of the journalistic landscape above.)
What are journalists using ARVR for in immersive journalism today?
A: Immersive journalists use a variety of technologies to develop media, but primarily WebAR, AR, and VR.
Literature Review Results
“The production of news in a form in which people can gain first-person experiences of the events or situations described in news stories”
- Nonny de la Peña et al. (2010, 291) defining immersive journalism
What we learned:
How is their storytelling process affected by immersive technologies?
A: Immersive journalism provides:
Novel control over a consumer’s sensory experience and available interactivity
The sensation of living an experience, with potential for increased empathy and behavioral outcomes (Sundar et al., 2017)
Initial findings from a literature review
Primary Research
How do immersive creators interface with immersive technologies to create immersive stories?
Goal
With context gathered from secondary research, I sought to understand immersive creators’ existing workflows, challenges, goals, and means by which they interface with immersive technologies to create journalistic stories via semi-structured interviews.
Subquestions
What are their goals?
What technologies are they using?
What kinds of stories are they telling?
What challenges do they face?
How do users want to use immersive technology now vs prospectively?
Constraints
Timeline of ~ 1 month
A total budget of $500
A difficult to recruit population: immersive creators
Method
I designed a semi-structured interview in two parts.
Discovery - 40-45 minutes
Goal
Understand how immersive creators are interfacing with immersive journalism step-by-step, who they think are key players in the space, how technology impacts their choices, and what challenges and goals they are arriving at.
Types of questions
Organizational structure, exploration of a recent project, storytelling process, technology used, goals, challenges
An excerpt of my ‘Discovery’ questions protocol
2. Magic Wand Activity - 15-20 minutes
Goal
Understand the successes and pain points of existing immersive creation workflows by exploring a creator’s recent immersive news story.
Types of questions
Describe a recent news story you worked on, what would be changed/stay the same?
An excerpt of my ‘Magic Wand’ questions protocol
Recruitment
N = 9
Method
Snowball recruitment via electronic correspondence
Recruitment criteria
Direct involvement in the development or production of at least one immersive journalistic story in the past 2 years
Synthesis
I led a team-based qualitative analysis of our interview data through affinity diagramming on Miro
Insights
1. ‘Storyliving’ over storytelling.
Immersive creators are motivated to leverage XR to unlock deeper means of generating connection, because stories struggle when they cannot get audiences to connect.
Many immersive creators mentioned the power of XR in relation to its ability to help consumers connect more deeply and to internalize a message. In their eyes, this is the primary power of XR—it’s an augmentary tool that allows them to add depth to an existing story they are working on.
Journalists also use XR because it provides a new paradigm for consumers to understand a story in relation to themselves.
“So we've got an interactive web experience, where the person literally advances the narrative, depending on their curiosities. Let's say you're someone who's living in Maine, and you say, ‘Yeah, but you know, there was no racism or people killed in Maine. And that all happened in Mississippi and Alabama. Well, you can actually go and explore and see what happened in Maine. And what you'll see is, yes, sure enough, there was a case in Maine and this is not beholden to the South. This is a national problem. And this is part of our history. And so you can actually explore where your curiosities might take you based on who you are. Maybe you're a 15 year old girl, right? In a history class. So [imagining that I’m that girl] I'm kind of curious where there are other young girls like myself, right, whose cases they're reexploring, and I can go into...it's participatory storytelling.”
- P2, Senior Producer of Innovation and Special Products, Frontline
2. Prioritize accuracy over engagement.
An immersive creator’s priority is engagement in service of their message, not engagement for engagement's sake.
Creators are wary of the power of immersive experiences on multiples levels. They are concerned about ethics of engagement — for the consumers engaging, and who those consumers engaging with.
“If I do a photogrammetry interview with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and then let you put AOC into your space, what are the darkest parts of the internet going to do to abuse that scan and take screenshots and videos of it. So there are ethical considerations to really be cognizant of...[if I were to place AOC in] AR I'm gonna put her in a virtual office. Why? It's really it fits the story I'm trying to tell. It feels more immersive. And it precludes the reality that this space is for abuse.”
- P3, Director of XR Editorial, Yahoo News
Another concern immersive creators have is preserving the authenticity of their story so as not to mislead the audience—even though this sometimes comes at the expense of improving engagement.
3. Success looks a lot like traditional journalism.
Immersive creators care about the success of their work in relation to traditional journalistic goals, such as availability, engagement, and clarity.
Availability;
For immersive creators, this means catering to the most common consumer access points for journalism. Content must be available on the most common consumer hardware and software platforms (phones, social media sites, and the web), and immersive media should be is primarily lightweight and short-form in nature - 2 minutes or less
Engagement;
Immersive creators want as many people as possible to engage with their work.
“I don't think there is a standard yet for immersive, the one that we always were, would go back to at Yahoo was engagement and time spent, and we saw huge increases, in that, you know, once people found the AR and understood how to launch the AR, they stayed. And that was really meaningful.”
- P1, Former Director XR Partner Program, Yahoo
Clarity;
Immersive creators want the message of their content to be clear.
“We generally try to identify one thing that we're trying to communicate in a statement...we want to get to the point and make sure we can deliver that point. So being able to sort of summarize our message, in one statement, really puts it into a box that we can hope to deliver.” - P6, Software Engineer, R&D, The New York Times
Design implications
Insights
‘Storyliving’ over Storytelling.
Prioritize accuracy over engagement.
Success looks a lot like traditional journalism.
Implications
Design new means by which immersive creators can deepen the connections audiences make to material.
Design frameworks for immersive creators that ensure their message (or its factuality) is not lost in the use of immersive technology.
Design new means by which immersive creators can measure viewership.
Impact
This primary and secondary research—particularly design implication #2— functioned as a standalone resource which informed my team’s ideation and design process.
The foundational nature of this research informed the design principles of the software product my team generated.
Reflection
I think the ‘Magic Wand’ activity could be recreated in a better manner; because of the future-facing aspects of this activity, I tried to ground my questions in a recent project my participants had worked on. Despite this grounding, however, it was hard for participants to imagine how the process could be improved. In the future, I plan to break my question down into sections and ground it at a lower level.
Recruitment for this project was very scrappy and—fortunately—turned out alright. That said, in the future I would build in more time to recruit participants if possible.
I initially made the call with my team that we would all analyze our data separately, and then come together to assess commonalities in our analysis. I’ve found this process has worked for me in the past when working with other researchers, and based this decision on previous experience. This experience dramatically failed, however, due to my stakeholders’ design backgrounds; each of us analyzed the data somewhat differently, and resultantly time was wasted and we needed to reanalyze the data together. In the future, I plan to complete analysis with a greater awareness of my stakeholder needs to ensure that there is proper buy-in for my research results and so that everyone is on the same page.
While this research provides a comprehensive understanding of the goals, process, and pain points of immersive journalists, little is known about how their end users—consumers—interact with immersive journalism, or why they do. Future research is needed on this area, which will hopefully become more possible as more people increase immersive media consumption.