The TCU 360 redesign project started today. We didn’t start drawing sketches or brainstorming concepts. We didn’t choose theme colors or assign a new logo design. TCU 360 is nothing if it doesn’t reach our audience, so that’s where we started.

Here’s the deck from our meeting. Go ahead and take a look.

A recent article inspired our discussion.

On May 27, NiemanLab published the article “What happened when a college newspaper abandoned its website for Medium and Twitter.”

What really inspired us about the project described in the article was that the team at Mt. San Antonio College didn’t build and expect the audience to come; SAC.Media met its audience in that audience’s own spaces — Medium and Twitter.

TCU 360 is not moving to Medium and Twitter, but we do want to provide the best experience possible for our users. In order to do that, we’ll have to speak with our users and start to understand their stories and how news consumption fits into their lives.

This is something I have been dying to do.

After graduating from Medill, I went to work as a user experience designer at a tech startup in Dallas. Then an odd thing happened. Actually, it didn’t happen. In the year and a half I spent at that company, I didn’t speak to one user or potential user.

I tried. I conducted a user survey. It cost about $200, and the CEO promptly reprimanded my manager for allowing the waste of funds. The sales people would talk to their customers, he said. They would tell us what they wanted.

Of course, that’s not how it works. Often, people don’t know exactly what they want. The job of a user experience designer — the job of the product development team — is to understand the story of the user so well that he or she can design a product that makes users’ lives easier in ways that those users wouldn’t have thought of. That’s innovation.

Insert favorite quote from Jeanne Liedtka, design thinking extraordinaire:

“There is a big difference between knowing your customer well enough to sell better and knowing them sufficiently well to identify their unarticulated needs.”

And that’s what we will do at TCU 360. We’ll innovate. Our audience will inform us. Outside-the-box thinkers like SAC.Media will inspire us. And we hope to inspire you with our final product. Stay tuned.