Dagens Välfärd's website - the Open Square

Editor's Notes

• #4: We chose to focus on the General public mainly because everyone makes up the General Public. People in the other four user groups have professional motivations for using the DagenValfard website because of their job, but they also may have personal motivations to come to the website because of their personal life.General Public is a very broad user group so we further narrowed our focus by defining characteristics of our user group. These characteristics are:They are not professionally involved in the social economy. That means they come to the website because of personal motivations. Examples areUnemployed Children studentsAnother characteristic is that they have some time constraints because of a busy lifestyleThey have intermediate internet skills and betterDependent on the internet as an information sourceAnd for this project we further focus on people who are interested in issues related to the health economy in Sweden.
• #5: We chose three types of fieldwork techniques.1. We created an online questionnaire using Google Docs. The purpose of this was mainly to understand how people use the internet, what will motivate them to contribute online and their needs from a website that required online participation. 2. We Interviewed 5 people. The purpose of the interviews was to also understand how people use the internet but also to identify exact topics about the social economy in Sweden that they are interested in. 3. We looked at several benchmark websites for ideas for our concept design.The questionnaire and interview were just done on a relatively small number of people so the results do not represent the entire user group, however for this short project we work with the few results we received for making our concept design.
• #6: From the online questionnaire one important result is that people like to contribute online in different ways but most prefer faster ways to contribute.
• #7: We interviewed 5 people about their technical and personal needs from the type of website our project focuses on.We learned about their internet usage and also their personal interest in the Swedish social economy.The main points from these interviews were that:They are all interested in heath issues in Sweden, based on one of their personal experiences.People interviewed has a busy lifestyle so they already do not have enough time to be further actively involved online.Most of them used to be active in online social networks however now they have privacy concerns so they do not are less willing to give information abut themselvesSome of these people are not Swedish. When they were moving to Sweden their main source of information was the internet.Everyone thinks that it is already difficult to keep track of everything that requires them to sign up to online. There were several more points raised in the interviews however these 5 are the most important ones for our project.
• #8: We found many websites that helped us get ideas for our concept design, however three main ones are here.
• #9: Based on the field work we identified several user needs. We focused on six main user needs which are shown in red.People need information that is not out of dateAlso the information should seem to be reliable They need to have different options for online contributionsThey need online privacyThey need a website that is easy for them to use so that it does not require too much of their time. “Don’t make me think” principle.And also people need to feel connected to a community of people with the same issues, interests, background, occupation etc. This makes them feel welcomed to contribute online.
• #10: Unified – one source of informationPrivacy – possibility to be annonimous. Community – sense of understanding, welcoming, belonging, networking, connected etc..Playable – motivation by gamification Ex, valuable for users who did sign in and contributions.Flexible contributions- polls, support buttons, comments, posting videos and pictures, share with others.
• #12: This is a picture of all our concept ideas in the brainstorming phase.We came up with a slogan that summarises our focus for the concept design …
• #13: Based on the user needs and the use qualities we defined some key design decisions. These are:Provide different ways for online contribution which include:pollsSupportsComments and posts on issues affecting you‘user report’ by pictures/videos of observations in societyAnother key design decision is allowing people to sign in using existing accounts but also give the option for them to create a new account for signing into the Open Sqaure.A personalized user profile where there are various settings.Privacy settings such as if you can appear as an anonymous userMotivate users to contribute by gamification. Our idea is that people will receive reward in increments. First intangible digital, ‘rewards’ such as a badge and then more tangible rewards such as a coupon for free coffee. Other reward are:Being invited to submit an article for publication on the website / magazineMade a moderator of a forum discussionAlso the possibility to link to other social networking websites such as facebook and twitter.And silhouettes so that people feel welcomed and connected to a community
• #14: Tags for search and sorting discussions
• #15: We created a quick mockup of the website using Microsoft Sketchflow. We used this to do concept design testing on four people.Here is a screenshot of the homepage of the prototype we used for this user testing.From this testing we received good feedback such as: text needed to explain the Open Square on the home page Why sign in misleading phrases such as “Join the society” Links did not go to pages the user expectedHowever we realised that all the users had difficulties in focusing on our design concepts and not the technical aspects of the prototype.This digital approach to testing made it in some ways not successful, so we decided to do another round of testing using a paper prototype.
• #17: User clicks “My new topic”Sees a pop up box with place for text and option to upload a picture or video. Also the user has to select some tags that are suited for this website.
• #18: The person selects “Health” and the text in the speech bubbles change to random recent and popular topics about health.
• #22: We tested the paper based prototype on 2 more people.From this we learnt that: The search option in the Open Square needs to be more obvious Marketing requirements for more catching phrases and text