The McClatchy Innovation team facilitates design-thinking programs across McClatchy's corporate departments and 30 newspaper markets. Ranging from one day bootcamps to a five-month accelerator, these sessions apply human-centered principles to existing or new projects at McClatchy. Our goal is to foster a culture of design thinking and implement a user-centered approach to projects and processes across the company. Learn more about our work, mission and programs here.
Design Thinking Workshops
Through prototypes, user journeys and user testing, I helped teams participating in Innovation programs create a holistic user experience for their project or service. I worked with teams to test an audible news playlist for local newspapers, prototyped and tested a video dictionary for English-learners, and designed early stages of a new website for Activate Good based an empathy interviews and user feedback.
Design Thinking in a Box
After the workshops, I provide teams with the resources and connections to bring a project to life. Design Thinking in a Box includes mindset cards, brainstorming constraint cards, empathy interview cards and templates for recording each step in the design process. I created Design Thinking in a Box to make our programs more scalable and memorable. These resources allows teams to continue learning in their daily work and help strengthen the design-thinking culture across the company.
I also designed internal brand and marketing items for the Innovation team, including reports, presentations and newsletters to communicate our mission and ongoing initiatives to leaders across McClatchy.
Projects and Tests
Below are a few posts from our internal blog, McClatchy Innovation Collective, that document learnings from previous and ongoing projects.
Matter Partner Program
I participated in Matter VC’s 2017 Partner Program as a design-thinking coach and UX designer for McClatchy's team. Throughout the five-month accelerator I worked with four journalists from the Raleigh News & Observer to research, prototype and test Loro, a video dictionary app for English-learners that used McClatchy-produced video and user-generated content to put language into context of current events. The app was inspired by an interview with Jairon, an immigrant high school student who used a Snapchat group to learn new English words with his friends.
Loro saw many design updates and iterations after making its debut at Matter’s Design Review Two this August. Through conversations with experts, stakeholders and users, we improved the UI and UX of Loro to make it more useful, robust and fun for English learners.
We developed two lo-fi prototypes of Loro, one more visual using Adobe XD and one more functional using WordPress. We took these prototypes, as well as a card-sorting exercise, to Jairon’s high school and the Hispanic Family Center to observe how students and Spanish-speakers reacted and responded to Loro.
McClatchy Innovation teamed up with members of the the UX, video, podcasting and marketing teams for a second Hear What Matters diary study. With this test, we wanted to explore different audio formats and verify our findings in another McClatchy market.
Paired with a cross-functional team representing McClatchy employees from product, marketing and design, as well as two reporters from the News and Observer, McClatchy Innovation successfully conducted a week-long diary study that tested the desirability of a local audio news playlist called Hear What Matters.
Starting with a predetermined solution—a website—presented a new challenge for our team: How can we tailor our existing program for a redesign, rather than an invention? We shifted a few presentations around, shortened a few others, and ended with a very successful and exciting week.
