I was one of thirteen journalism students invited to spend three months in San Francisco learning about media innovation and design research. As part of the program we had a design consulting project with Intuit. We were also each matched with a San Francisco startup for a 10 week project – I worked with a journalism venture, CALmatters, to set up a KPI Strategy and an audience engagement plan.

Intuit Design Research

Intuit tasked us with designing a service to make monitoring and improving credit easier. We developed a credit score app called Mini, where users could visualize their credit score as a digital plant. A lot of design research – user testing, storyboarding, feedback sessions, group brainstorming – went into our final design of Mini. At the end of the quarter we presented an app demo, as well as a branding guidelines document and navigational wizard, to a panel of Intuit designers. Below you can view some of the final deliverables, including portions of the app demo and the branding guidelines.

Through our research, we determined that people consider credit boring, impersonal and confusing, so with Mini we wanted to make a credit app that was engaging, relatable and simple. The straightforward approach to credit score, guided credit goal structure, and helpful credit usage page were designed with those important qualities in mind. Below are a few of the screens that we displayed in our app demo.

We also created a thorough brand guidelines document, because we felt that our brand characteristics and image were important to the success of Mini. The guidelines cover everything from logo and icon usage to voice and tone to reminder structure. Below is a sample of pages from the document.

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CALmatters Audience Analytics

Also while in San Francisco I spent 10 weeks working with a local journalism venture, CALmatters. I worked with their social media officer to craft an audience engagement strategy. I also worked with the COO, Marcia Parker, to develop a KPI strategy and a mock-up of a metric dashboard to display progress on KPI’s. It was a valuable experience in learning engagement strategies across different verticals and understanding the business strategy behind not-for-profit journalism companies. Below you can view a few of the final deliverables related to these projects.

This is the engagement plan deliverable for CALmatters. It shows our process from researching relevant verticals to identifying and creating engagement plans for influencers within those verticals. It was handed in alongside a spreadsheet containing hundreds of California-area influencers in a range of verticals.

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For the KPI Strategy deliverable, we split the indicators into three categories – Informing Californians, Building Relationships and Reaching Californians. Within each of these we did a KPI analysis and provided in-depth descriptions on the unique value of each KPI and how they might be measured.