Spectrum News & Sports: Raven Elections

Role: UX Research: User Interviews, Legacy System Analysis, User Testing

UX/UI Design

Tools: Whiteboard, Figma, Lucidchart

Overview: Raven is a data aggregate used by Spectrum News teams to find and use information used in  digital and linear news. The Raven application was in the process of being enhanced per Raven application. With the upcoming National presidential election, news producers needed a fast and reliable way to broadcast election news and run election night programs.

Process & Deliverables

• UX analysis of existing Raven Elections and other Raven Applications: Information gathering and current state review
  
• User Interviews: 3 senior station producers/managers, 6 linear news producers, 3 graphics specialists, 1 program director
• Design Sprint:
  • Sitemap
  • Wireframes
  • Information Architecture
• Prototype Testing
  • User Testing
  • Stakeholder Review
  • Design Refinement 
• Developer handoff 
  • Handoff documention
  • Grooming, ticket review & sprint planning
    

During the research phase of the Raven Elections project, I conducted end user interviews to identify the needs, and pain points of news producers that would be using Raven elections. I sought to understand their production process to understand where data would be coming from and the outputs it needed to be used in and how. Raven Elections is used by news production teams at various stations, and each station has it’s own operational differences. It was important that I interviewed a number of individuals with different roles at different stations to gain an understanding of the full capacity of requirements of the application.

Goals:

• Manage Display Lists (tickers)
• Manage Races and Race data components
• Create and manage manual races, candidate and votes
• See live updates of vote counts, candidates, parties, races 
• Ability to quickly see leader changes and manage races for Display Lists and ticker board displays 

Pain Points:

• Data inconsistencies with data not updated throughout application, and UX made data challenging and laborious to update
• Challenging UX and buried access points- modals nested in modals, multiple save actions to complete actions, many steps to access information and complete tasks

Solution

Users needed to easily and reliably pull, manage, update and organize elections data to be used in Display Lists for linear and digital news outlets. Accurate data and manual updates that were carried throughout the application were an important componenet in addition to improved ease of use in CRUD functionality. In addition to these general UX and reliability improvements to the tool, we also wanted to improve the overall expereince with visual cues to make the data more scannable and easily understood. 

Race Drawers 

The way we displayed Race data was important, race results are what producers are using to create news segments and are reporting on. It was important they could edit names if necesary, adjust vote counts easily for multiple races for manual races (used for very small elections) and easily scan vote results, winners, and leader changes. We used data visuals and icons in the race drawers to make them easy to scan for the leader, winner and status of a race. 

Display Lists

Display list management was the most complex component of the Raven Elections functionality. Users needed to create Display Lists, then manage, cue, and play races within that lists in collaboration with an anchor broadcasting a segment live about that election. We wanted producers to be able to see race updates including leader changes and calls, then be able to cue and play those races on TV based on the most relevant elections data including race calls, and accumulating vote counts coming in from data sources. 

We used a sortable list of all available races that could be added to a display list on that page with bulk actions to add, remove, and re-order. We included a tabbed view of the display list section to view cued races to play on air.

User Testing

Because this project was a redesign of an existing application, we needed to validate that not only did the designs serve the needs of our end users, we also needed to make sure they were an improvement to the legacy system. We wanted end user understanding and ease in use and their support in making the enhancements we designed.

We performed 3 rounds of moderated user testing with the support of the Spectrum user research team to validate our designs. 

• Testing validation goals: 
• General efficacy, understanding, and appeal of designs
• User ability to access Raven Elections, and find specific elections data
• User ability to make updates to specific elections data, and create Display Lists for their station.

Future Raven Enhancements 

The design patterns used in Raven Elections were reused to quickly enhance other Raven Applications including the High School Sports aggregate. Allowing the development team to redesign the experience of this portion of the Raven Application in just 3 development sprints. Using components created for Raven Elections in various use cases. Not only expediting development time and saving money, but also building a more consistent experience across Raven.