Design Research in Youth Media
Project Background
In January 2020, the Medill Knight Lab at Northwestern wanted to understand how high school media programs function. This grew out of necessity as local news publications are dwindling and more news deserts are appearing across the United States. The Knight Lab Studio ran a 10-week project with the goal of conducting design research to survey the high school journalism landscape. We aimed to understand the diversity of programs through their similarities and differences in how they run, what their media production processes are, and who their audiences are. Ultimately, our mission was to make news easier to produce by learning about the high school journalism space, which could in turn reveal pain points and ways that the Knight Lab could develop resources to aid these programs.
Much of the research involved conducting long-form interviews and then synthesizing the information into meaningful connections across programs.
Design Research Methods
To effectively research the high school journalism landscape, we had to first understand this space. We sought to find out how prominent these programs were, what their current state is (were their numbers dwindling like other local sources of news?), and how they differed in various types of schools (public, private, and charter). From there, we added constraints onto our research to generally investigate schools in the Chicagoland area. With initial landscape research, we then moved into semi-structured interviews with two groups: advisors and journalism students.
After gaining insight from these interviews, we then reached out to our final group, high school journalism audiences, via a survey of nearly 50 high-school students to understand their media consumption habits and how it relates to their school's journalism programs.
To develop personas, each group was extensively researched and paired with interviews to produce an accurate depiction.
Results - What the High School Journalism Landscape Looks Like
From our extensive research and interviewing, we were able to develop two detailed personas: one for advisers and one for high school journalists. Our intent was to focus on what works well and motivates these two groups, as well as what painpoints and struggles they face while participating in high school journalism.
Personas do not tell the story, however. Below our final presentation highlights the most important challenges going forward in helping high school journalism programs thrive. This was derived from the interviews as well as the survey data, which indicated that high school students are consuming media and are cognizant of news, but their school publications are not meeting them in the online platforms they pay attention to. This led to our ultimate research question: How might we help high school journalists engage with their audience on social media platforms? We began the process of ideating possible answers to this question, but this challenge will be what the next cycle of the Knight Lab Studio will focus on.
personal Learning Outcomes
This project was a great way for me to build upon my design skills and to showcase leadership. As one of the more experienced designers, I helped lead the team through many of the ways to research users/audiences, as well as synthesizing the research into building personas, and ideating potential solutions to alleviate the painpoints we came across. Additionally, I was able to learn about project management by heading our team's Trello workflow, and I gained more experience using Adobe Illustrator by creating the persona graphics.