Colorado Media Project
Using human centered design to create new ways of distributing local news.
The Colorado Media Project is a civic initiative aimed at assisting local journalism networks with adapting to the digital world we live in. When CMP was launched, the agency I co-founded, Cultivo Media, was tasked with working alongside Boston Consulting Group to coordinate market research and product prototyping.
My position in the project was primarily focused on product prototyping and testing as a part of the human centered design process used by the team. With the secondary research provided by BCG in hand, we set out to interview a wide variety of Colorado newsreaders in order to determine core behaviors, desires and issues with their news consumption habits. After identifying major themes that were found across most interviews, we developed the following insights regarding colorado news consumers:
- Readers want to hear both political perspectives
- Perceived relevance to the reader is important in what they decide to read
- News needs to be quick and efficient to consume
- Readers want their news to feel like entertainment that isn't a waste of time
With these insights, our team developed “how might we…” statements and built prototypes around each. I led the design and development of the prototypes and the mechanisms to test the success of each. Our findings can be found in the final prototype report on the CMP website here: https://coloradomediaproject.com/blog/2018/9/2/the-cultivo-media-prototypes
This one was super fun and the first experience I had with consulting work. I have leaned on the human centered design process on a number of projects since, and the overall experience in project management has been foundational.
A few years later, some of my former business partners are launching a new venture surrounding the prototypes developed in this project, which I will sit on the board for.