A corner store sign and my thoughts on simple, ongoing newsroom user research

I posted a picture of a sign I saw in my local corner store in News Product Alliance today, and realized I had more thoughts to share about it. It reminded me of how simple user research can sometimes be, and how I aspire for more newsrooms to incorporate asking and receiving audience feedback as an ongoing function.

Newsrooms are embracing user research more to learn about and respond to their audience's needs, but it can be easy to feel like we need to pause to design and conduct an extensive audience survey every time we want to gain insights about what our readers want. We're not always able to do that, so we look for time-bound spaces to start small, like asking for reader input on plans for a specific coverage vertical, but those usually have a limited scope of how and when to respond.

In the absence of the capacity to conduct structured research, I've been trying to embrace more ongoing feedback in my work to help me plan out the next larger steps of a project or product. What I loved about this sign was how clear, instructive, and value-driven it was: here is exactly how you give us feedback, here is the specific feedback we want, and here is what you'll get if you give it to us. It was tied to the main function of the business and was unrestrictive, yet it had specific bounds. (They're clearly not asking me if I think they should start a rent-a-pony operation as part of the store, or expand onto the neighboring block, just what I want to be able to walk down the street and buy. I said Vitamin Water.)

News does not respond to the same needs as a local corner store, but as a community institution, we can communicate with our audiences in a similar way. Yet without a prompt, our audience might not know that they can give us the feedback we're looking for. I did not know I could ask for my favorite beverage to be stocked until I walked in and saw this sign!

Similarly, not every reader who comes across a site knows how to "submit a tip" to an editor or what they might be limited to giving feedback on in a customer care complaint. The feedback that comes through these channels in between structured newsroom research periods (editor tip lines, customer care complaints, or social media comments) is useful but can be difficult to triage, catalog, and evaluate over time. And by only asking for that on our website, we're unintentionally filtering what kind of feedback we're asking for (and probably who we're asking it from, too). 

I have learned about features, bugs, coverage ideas, format inspiration, and potential collaborators through directly asking for continuous feedback from users that otherwise would not be in a structured focus group or survey.  In one startup setting, my colleagues and I experimented with setting up a simple form on our site that asked for feedback "How's it going? What do you think of our publication?" gave a quick filter to the type of feedback (coverage/billing/other), and then gave an option to submit. The filter helped a little, though we still got a mix about responses: some about subscriptions, some about bugs on our platforms, and others that were notes on specific initiatives or stories. Sometimes newsrooms have other ways to serve this function and capture this kind of input, like a text line or a call to respond to a newsletter email. My main point is: You don't know what you'll get until you ask! And it doesn't have to be that hard or complex to do so, either. 

And no, newsrooms are not going to be able to respond to every piece of feedback that comes in. That's an expectation that can be set at the prompt. (I did not respond that I wanted to rent-a-pony from the store. If I did, they probably wouldn't do it.) But if we're serious about care as a practice in work and being a product that responds to and fills information gaps in the communities we cover, we have to show we're consistently interested in our audiences' voice in shaping our work and give them multiple ways to do so, too – not just during designated periods, for specific iniaitives or in opportunities that require labor-intensive participation. (I said Vitamin Water last week, in the future I might say something else.)

Keep your plans for audience research, user testing, and community listening periods. All I'm saying is that there might also be lo-fi, creative, and easy ways to ask for what you're looking to hear about in your day-to-day work, too. And when you do ask, make it like this sign: with quick, clear instructions on how to give the feedback, a focused prompt, and an idea about what you'll do with the input received.