#Research Completed:
##Market & User Base Research ###Analysing Existing Markets & Community Groups The application we’re building, psCmm, will include mechanisms such as users linking to and editing news articles of substance. These news articles will be linked to the community by the users and edited by the collective user base. These edits will be voted on by the community to ensure that they are accurate and free of misrepresentation. Although there are many more features, this will be the bread-and-butter of the application.
The objectives with this would be to build the application to cater for the community that the service is targeted towards. The application must operate efficiently and accurately in regards to the objective of correcting and fact-checking news organisations. For this to be the case, users must be highly interested in general news and the facts associated with articles. They must also have incentive to contribute as well as having the means to contribute.
For the users to have the means to contribute, we as the creators must develop the application to be similar in functionality to the applications that our target audience already uses. The familiarity will allow the community to form and grow with ease. It may even increase the likelihood of users to migrate their efforts to our platform rather than other community groups.
##1.0 Reddit Users of reddit, although not being considered to be our target user base as a whole, do have some sub communities that reflect the values and behaviours that we want to establish with psCmm. These communities, being a part of reddit, would also be familiar to contributing content and voting on content. This is the reason why they would be a good fit in terms of operating our application as well as collaborating effectively.
The values and behaviours we’re looking for such as; friendliness, minimal bias, interest in the facts, heavy/frequent contributions and civility can be seen in the follow subreddits.
r/WorldNews r/News r/Politics r/Business r/Economics
Identifying the demographics associated with these groups would better illustrate the potential users that may use psCmm regularly.
##1.1 Reddit (As A Whole) Reddit’s user base consists of the following demographic information.
The location and gender statistics have been pulled from information collected in December 2015, the age information has been collected in February 2016.
Page Views: 8 Billion Unique Visits: 234 Million Time per Session: 11mins
Although individual subreddits may show a different composition of data relating to gender, age and location, it is useful to note the composition of people that are at least somewhat familiar with the functionality relating to voting on posts and contributing to communities. Theoretically, there are 234 Million people as of December 2015 who understand this functionality. This provides a lot of potential users for psCmm and a good start to market analysis, however we need to further explore the demographic of the related subreddits/communities that were mentioned prior (in addition to site wide data).
##Stack Overflow ###Where it once succeeded Stack overflow was the go to website for coding and programming problems and questions with a community based approach. A lot of experts use this site and people found that they were able to learn coding just with the help of people on the site. ###Issues People with high reputation often don’t get downvoted, which is resulting in wrong answers being seen as the best answer. As well as this the community environment has become rather hostile as the user base consists of a large amount of arrogant programmers. User interface is very bad for user
Stack overflow has implemented rules and are constantly moderating these in order to resolve these issues. These rules aim to give questions the result of concise and to-the-point answers.
In doing this users feel like they are being steered towards certain opinions with questions being moderated and removed if they do not seem to be fitting (matter of opinion).
Reddit differs in this as people see that most of these non-allowed questions have value within the community. Therefore reddit seems to have a much larger trust factor in the cloud/community.
Key to Reddit’s success => upvoting and subgroups
##How to apply this to NACT
- Good ui
- Keep a distinct focus
- Subgroups
- Upvoting
##User testing on mockups
- Good tool to view original and edit history easily
- Hamburger button, switch to other side (left top corner), too cramped with other buttons in the top right corner
- Include subgroups
- X Button? Something that signifies opening or reading to expand
##Links to mock-ups/prototypes Interactive Prototype: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-RovhyP-6AldVpmLXE5ekZHSEk
Design Mock-up: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-RovhyP-6AlaFE5eEUtN0E1VlU
##Planning for future In the week 8 practical we discuss the mock-ups and prototypes and get some user-testing and see what people like and dislike about the designs and how easy the user interaction is. We will make appropriate changes and create further electronic prototypes based on this and perform further user-testing.
The research we have identified will help us understand who to target the application towards and how to design around this.
The research has also helped to understand where our influences (Reddit, StackOverflow, GitHub) succeed and fail so we can learn from this and learn how in include their best features into our application.