What the Heck is an MVP?

Often times on this blog I drop jargon bombs. Today's word of the day is "MVP". Now, although we know that the recipient of this award was Eli Manning at the 2012 Superbowl, in the product design world- it has a decidedly different meaning. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. If you check out wikipedia, you get this definition:

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

Yeah it sounds a little bit,  marketing-talk-ish, for me- but what I like about it is that really, it speaks to the fact that we are creating a thing- that at the end of the day has a brand, a function and a user (among many other qualities). Some people actually say that MVP stands for minimum viable prototype- which has an interesting, subtle difference in meaning. Prototypes are a kind of a product, for sure, but saying and most importantly deciding that something is a prototype- an experiment - a test is liberating and I think speaks more directly to the kind of work that I am currently doing.

In What do Prototypes Prototype? Stephanie Houde and Charles Hill describe how prototypes can help to answer and explore different kinds of design problems. They discuss how prototypes help you to evolve your design concepts.

Selecting the focus of a prototype is the art of identifying the most important open design questions. If the artifact is to provide new functionality for users- and thus play a new role in their lives- the most important questions may concern exactly what the role should be and what features are needed to support it.

In this paper, they go on to say that a brick could be a prototype- if it answers a specific kind of design question- for example--- what will my product weigh?

So, why am I talking about this? As I have been blogging about here, here and here- we are in the middle of an Open News Design Sprint. We defined our "MVP" for the Open News sprint as something that has some level of functionality and gets our concept across. But really this is not so much an MVP as a prototype. We are not yet at the point where we are concerned about productizing our idea- so much as expressing that idea.

The concept for our prototype is that we can morph the lovebomb.me into a tool that will empower journalists and those with a passion for writing into learning a set of web literacies.  But what are the questions that we are asking and trying to explore with prototype? We actually have several- as the prototype has a few components:

The Riddler also comes up with good questions, well maybe not "good"

1. Is this concept of embedding learning by having users deconstruct and reconstruct their own stories actually a good way to learn html and css?

2. Is editing html and css with the help of a preview window and an instructional overlay the most effective interaction for engaging users with this content?

3. What kind of tool will appeal to journalists who have never written html?

4. What kind of tool will appeal to users who do not self identify as journalists?

5. How can we incentivize learning of html and css for users?

All of these questions generally fall into 2 categories of Houde and Hill's prototype models - role and implementation. As they describe:

Role refers to questions about the function that an artifact servers in a user's life- the way in which it is useful to them.

Implementation refers to questions about the techniques are components through which an artifact performs its function- the "nuts and bolts" of how it actually works.

The prototype that we create will respond to both role and implementation design questions. So, what we are currently creating? Our prototype includes:

• a 2 page clickable site 
• page 1- intro that lets you input a url for something that you have written online
• page 2- a 3 panel page with the split editing window and the "instructional overlay

• copywriting
• landing page framing copy
• instructional text explaining how to use the 3 different "windows"
• explanatory text that explains techical things (for ex.: how to write a tag)
• descriptive text for issuing badges

The prototype will not be pretty but it will serve its purpose and help us to answer our questions. Finally, as Dan Sinker pointed out - "building something forced us to think through the details." And really, that pushes foward our movement to ultimately one day getting to an MVP.

Open News Design Sprint Day 3: Meet the Journalists

After two days of doing a design sprint brainstorming about a tool that could help journalists learn webmaking, we decided to go right to the source for help. We invited about a dozen journalists to join us for a conversation today. We lucked out and got a fantastic group of professionals with a variety of different skill sets and backgrounds. Journalists showed up representing tons of different orgs, including: New York Times, Forbes, Gotham Schools, NYU Journalism Institute, Mashable, NYU ITP and the Huffington Post.

The main question that we asked this group was: "What do they you to make on the web?"We had a range of responses to this question.  There we are a lot of answers in the categories of data manipulation, data visualization, interactives, and text based interactives.

"There are two categories: a special project that's a one-off that blows people away and wins awards. But the thing that's more interesting are the things that can sustain and help a community. A database of property transfers that is maintained and is there for someone to access when they want to find out about it. Something that continues, is sustained, and is part of the fabric of info flow in a community. Data that comes in and continues to live." (note that all quotes in this post are paraphrased from the session)

We delved into an interesting conversation about what journalists need to know in terms of learning about the underpinnings of webmaking. Many participants talked about wanting to learn skills that actually fall into the category of "design thinking."

"Journalists don't have the knowledge of when to use a map vs not use a map. Or from a story to getting more interactive. They need to understand that a story isn't just an article, that it can be a whole bunch of different things. design thinking methodology"

"When you get down to it, we have a history of journalists as writers. But the last thing you want is a situation when all the journalists become coders. The more powerful thing is to have more of that process--the methodology/training/etc. To run a group of coders, or talk to coders. To know enough about your topic to come up with ideas and know if something is feasable or not. Not to be condescending, but 'skills are for interns' they are important to know to do, but nobody's going to make work-changing this just coding CSS. Skills are great and they're important, but it's about getting to understand the bigger picture. We spend a lot of time on, what do you call it, agile journalism."

I explained to the group that I personally have no interest in forcing anyone to learn how to code, but I was interested in learning about what would empower journalists to take an interest in webmaking.

"It's about showing them good work, and then showing them easy things--things that are very much within reach. It's about motivating them and liberating them."

"A big problem is internal. Which traffic cop gives the most tickets per parking meter: you dont' want to wait for six weeks for the data guys to come back to you with the answer. It's about being able to quickly test a hypothesis that could be interesting. There could be a story here--well, you want to know that quickly. Maybe the distribution of skills in the newsroom is 200 writers and 2 coders--it's going to be a long time before that. How much coding do you need to be able to play and test those hypothesis?"

"It's the bridge/demystification thing. There's a big wall--it feels like it. But then you go to hackjams and it feels attainable. It demystified it. When you realize those tools are attainable."

Mentorship and peer based learning was another topic that came up. One participant admitted to the group that he had signed up for CodeAcademy because of "social peer pressure" but then is now in the position where he has 6 untouched lessons in his inbox. This is because the great myth about something like CodeAcademy is that you are doing it with your friends. You signed up because your friends tweeted about it and you got all pumped up and signed up together- but then you are at home by yourself at the end of the day- not coding. Another participant talked about how she and a friend got a book and together followed all the steps to learn Python. After a month or so, they hired a "geek" to ask questions. We talked about how there are online communities for that like Stack Overflow or Quora- but these are often intimidating communities where a journalist would never think to go.

We asked for some initial feedback on the prototypes that we are working on. Here were some of their responses:

1) On the sequencing of learning content: Is the tag flashy enough to be the first thing that is taught in the instructional overlay?

• some say yes, some say no. The yes came from a not super tech savy journalist "I don't want big blocks of text"

2)  On the editing window: I see a lot of use of the immediacy of the left/right pane as tool

• everyone agrees

• "there is no internal demo tool other than building the page

3) On if this is useful: Yes: even myself, on my Tumblr, if I want to make a change, etc, I have to publish it, look at it, reload, etc, that's incredibly frustrating.

• A bigger use-case  for this is internal training, self training, etc. I'm throwing in on being the weekend home page editor.

4)  On Badges: I can totally see only entertaining resumes from people with that badge. And if you don't have it, spend a weekend to earn it. 

At the end of the session- Carl Lavin was generous enough to sit with me and tell me-- if we were going to do webmaking 201, 301 etc for journalists what topics would he want covered. He wrote out these cards for me:

I think these will be really useful when we start to build out learning pathways for our Mozilla learning offerings.

I spent a good deal of time picking the journalists brains as well about the topic that I have been struggling with this week- about framing this as a project about storytelling or something specifically for journalists- and many participants told me that they prefer the storytelling angle because it is something that can appeal to a larger audience. Some of the journalists told me that that "journalism" means different things to different people, but at the end of the day everyone has a story to tell. And that is something that I can bake into the prototype!

       

Storytelling- Day One of Design Sprint "Webmaking for Journalists"

Today was the first day of the Open News - Webmaking 101 design sprint. Thanks to Hive NYC member Peoples Production House for graciously volunteering to host us! The team for our sprint includes:

pictured: erin knight, chris lawrence, michelle levesque, dan sinker, atul varma, brian brennan, jess klein and mark surman (not included are some top secret special guests who shall be named later this week!)

We started the day airing out our joint concerns about the direction of the project. It turns out, I wasn't the only one who was concerned about the tool not making sense within the range of potential tools that we might be developing at Mozilla. We all discussed what a journalist would want to make- and agreed that a journalist would want to use the web to tell their story. While this might sound simplistic, this is a topic that I am much more comfortable developing a project around compared to something like Webmaking 101 for Journalists. As I talked about in my last post, here is an example of a potential user who has a deep interest and motivation to make something (a story) using the web- and thus there is the opportunity to embed learning into this moment. Also, I think that the idea of storytelling has the potential to reach different kinds of learners (although it could certainly appeal to journalists)- including filmmakers, poets, youth etc.

We came up with a few goals for the week, including:

• create a dirty working prototype- it doesn't have to be pretty, just having some functionality
• designing some badges for the prototype

After determining our goals, we set to work reviewing the learning objectives for the project. This is a key thing for us to to review, because we wanted to make sure that the project fell within the scope of web literacies that are being defined for Mozilla.  We had a good conversation about what could be included and what was out of scope for the project. Here is a little venn diagram that shows the domains within Mozilla's web literacies that this particular project will be addressing.

Essentially, there are 6 clusters/modules/ steps that we will be exploring through this exercise in helping people to tell their story through the web (below). While we will offer the skills in a series, ideally the user will have the opportunity to take these modules out of any particular sequence.

1. All about Tags
2. Style Your Stuff
3. Images
4. Links and the Open Web
5. Embedding and Beyond
6. Sharing

In our first brainstorm, we discussed using these 6 modules as guides for badge distribution within the context of the prototype.

Tomorrow we will be mapping these modules and learning objectives to storyboards for the instructional overlays and starting to work on developing out the content and copy for that section. I am really excited with the direction that this project is going and with our re-envisioning of the learning objectives as well as scope.

Webmaking 101 for Journalists: A Prototype

Lately, I have been thinking about how to teach people something unexpected while they are working on something that they are passionate about. It sounds kind of obvious, but my goal isn't to trick someone into learning or to serve them medicine in their sugar. I want to create authentic learning experiences around webmaking projects.  I believe that if you are really invested in something, then you will seek out the learning. It's not an innovative idea- but it is a guiding principle behind my design. So, with this in mind, recently, a bunch of my Mozilla colleagues and I brainstormed around the idea of how to teach journalists the basics of html, css and copyright in an authentic way.

As a group, we came up with several learning objectives - really focused on the introductory skills that a) anyone who was starting in webmaking would need and b) a journalist would be compelled to learn

The idea is that a user will come to the the website, and then enter a url of a story that they have written. If they do not have a url, then we will generate a creative commons page from propublica.com

 
Next,  the user's story will be scrapped of style and put into the js.bin shell-similar to our lovebomb and webpage maker prototypes.  However, instead of letting a user just do pure hacking in the wild- there is a third layer (seen above in the highly visible color of yellow). The yellow layer is a slider that will provide progressive instructions and tips to the user.

 

I started to work on a mock up just to play around a bit with look and feel. (above)  I made a mood board using pinterest. Basically, we are going for clean, serious- but playful, modern.

Right now, although I think that this is a good first prototype, I am really thinking about the learning objectives here. Are these the right learning objectives? Are we just skinning this as something for journalists because that is one of main target audiences at Mozilla? I'm wondering if we should be making a more generic webmaking 101 tool, and creating supplementary curriculum for the target audiences- as opposed to tools for the niche audience. In some ways, this has more merit, because the tools could be informed by the various end users- journalists, filmmakers etc, however it could appeal to a much larger constituency. On the other hand, if we create a tool that could easily be reskinned and modded for different audiences, I could see the value in that.

However... if we were to in fact make a more general webmaking 101 step by step tool/ game- ultimately I wonder if this really is the best way to communicate to new users the excitement and potential of webmaking?

Next week my Mozilla colleagues- Atul, Brian, Dan, Michelle, Erin and I will be doing a design sprint on this. I would love to hear any thoughts that you might have, reader friend.