Understanding the newsroom's complex workflows

To gain a fresh perspective on our project, we evaluated and compared numerous productivity tools, content creation tools, and content curation tools based on usability and features. Furthermore, we interviewed employees from organizations similar to Breaking News which deal with the curation and distribution of large amounts of data under a time constraint.

Domain Knowledge

Contextual Inquiries We immersed ourselves in the natural work environment and asked questions as work was occurring to understand our users’ tacit knowledge and uncover their underlying work structure. We conducted a total of 26 contextual inquiries over three research trips with editors, reporters, managing editors, and team leaders from the Speed Desk, Bloomberg First Word, and Bloomberg News reporters. These interviews allowed us to understand their various workflows and tools to uncover the different needs across teams.

Fly-on-the-wall observation

Due to the ongoing and intensive nature of breaking news, at times it became inappropriate for us to interrupt someone while they were working. An example of this was during the Speed Desk 4 o’clock rush when a massive amount of earning reports were released. During this time, we observed the Speed Desk and took copious amounts of notes without interrupting them.

Competitive Analysis

To draw inspiration for our design solution, we explored commercial tools with similar usage to those of the Breaking News team. We looked into 5 curation tools, 9 content creation tools, and 12 productivity tools. We created a set of usability and learnability criteria to evaluate competitors’ products in each of the categories and find what makes them effective.

Analogous Domains

In order to help inspire unique design ideas, we interviewed employees of organizations that deal with large amounts of information, learning more about the workflows and methods they use. Since we were particularly interested in those workflows which require team members to gather, manage, coordinate, and distribute large amounts of critical information in a timely manner, we specifically looked at the US Military, Urgent Care Nurses, Crowdforge (a system that uses the crowd to write individual articles), and the National Weather Service.

Newsrooms of The Future

Imagine how newsrooms will look in one year, five years, ten years, or more. To ensure our design solution is not short-lived, and to create a roadmap for implementing our design, our team looked at various technologies and trends that will shape the distribution of financial news in the future.