Last week, the audience research team showed the most recent version of our website to a handful of Evanston residents. This week, we are taking things one step farther and conducting a handful of in-depth usability tests, which will help us gauge what needs attending to in the few weeks we have left in the quarter.

The most difficult part of these usability tests so far has been the length: typically, these types of tests should take no longer than 10 to 15 minutes. People are busy, and asking them for more time might keep them from participating at all. What’s great about this next round of testing is we’ll be able to ask several more questions, spend much more time with our interviewees and (hopefully) get incredibly detailed insights as to how Evanston residents feel about our product.

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Last week I was interviewed by a Medill alumna who is writing an article about the program’s continued commitment to audience research. The story will appear in a future issue of Medill Magazine.

Christina started out by asking me why I’m personally so interested in audience research; naturally, this got me talking about the Audience Insight class taught by Rachel Davis Mersey here at Medill. I took Rachel’s class this past summer. I was already interested in audience understanding before taking the course; afterward, I knew I wanted to be part of the audience research team for the Fall 2010 innovation project and put my new skills to use.

We talked about the struggles, like how difficult and frustrating it can be to conduct man-on-the-street interviews with Evanston residents. People are busy, and they don’t always have time to stop for five to 10 minutes and answer a graduate student’s questions. Especially if they don’t understand the project or appreciate the value of local news. That portion of our audience research was arguably the most difficult.

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We’re about halfway through the quarter, and people are starting to take interest in Local Fourth and our community innovation project. This week, both Jason and I are being interviewed by a Medill alum who is writing an article about Asst. Professor Rachel Davis Mersey and Medill’s commitment to audience research.

It’s rare that I find myself in the interviewee’s chair  — I’m typically the one asking the questions. To help her prep for the interview, the alum asked for copies of our initial audience research findings and data. She sounds really intrigued by our project, and I look forward to telling her more about our process: what worked well, what worked not so well, successes and struggles, etc.

Though I’ve always been interested in audience research, my fascination was peaked when I was a student in Rachel’s class. It’s exciting to learn skills  and techniques in a classroom setting, but having the opportunity to actually implement them in a real project has been doubling rewarding.

Stay tuned for next week’s follow-up, where I’ll talk about how the big interview went!

You might be thinking that, since the audience research portion of this innovation project is mostly complete, Jason and I get to sit around and be lazy the rest of the quarter. Wrong.

Now that the technology team is moving forward with live designs, it’s partially become the audience team’s job to conduct usability tests and see what works and what needs improvement. Emily, one of the business team members, has experience with these sort of tests and focus groups and is helping us in this endeavor.

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Once Jordan, the audience team and I read through the in-depth interview questionnaires,  we started to segment our potential audience pool into reader ‘archetypes’.

Budding publications typically choose one ideal reader ‘persona’ to make the development phase much easier, including design, content, advertising and promotion. It also helps differentiate a publication and its content from the ever-growing list of niche periodicals on the market, which translates to more sales.

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A project like this cannot move forward until audience research has been conducted; that’s what the Local Fourth team has been working on the past few weeks. Talking with audience members is important when creating any new media product, but it’s arguably more crucial when dealing with the hyper-local space.

But how do you get in touch with as many Evanston residents as possible in such a short amount of time (and while taking into consideration the diverse group of people that live in our city?)

Here’s what my audience co-leader Jason Shough and I have been heading up the past few weeks.

Step #1 – The entire Local Fourth team hit the streets with a set of questions to see how well they tested with audience members. What questions generated insightful responses? What questions were answered with confused, puzzled looks?

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Hyperlocal is journalism’s latest buzz word. It’s also known as micropublishing or independent publishing. It’s the increasingly-studied online news and information ecosystem; a jolt in the creative disruption of traditional news media. Hyperlocal incorporates citizen journalism, social media and block by block reporting. First-time entrepreneurs are interested; so are large media organizations. Hyperlocal is organic, it’s innovative and it’s not sustainable. Not yet.

“We’re seeing an explosion of local online news startups across the United States,” reports Michele McLellan, a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow who helped host a gathering of hyperlocal publishers at the Block by Block: Community News Summit held in Chicago in September. “Even so, sustainability is a key challenge for most news publishers.”

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