PressBot for the Win
By: Esther Sanchez
I don’t like football, yet here I am creating a chatbot for football fans.
It began as the first round of speed dating. I knew two people in the class, yet there I was scrambling to find a group as quickly as possible, hoping they wanted to work on my VR idea. Instead, I began talking to Liliana and Connor — the only two individuals in the room that had a solid product already lined up. They seemed nice, then Eric showed up and joined the same time I did — thus creating the Dallas Morning News team!
At first, I was completely lost. I wasn’t sure what we were making, but it sounded impressive. I mean come on, auto-generated sport stories? How neat! The more we got into it, the more I grew to like it, but I felt like I was dead weight. I didn’t know much about football and I wasn’t ready to fully commit to the sport for the semester. That’s why I jumped on the idea of UX (user experience) and marketing.
I’ve had exposure to marketing before, but not on this level. Creating surveys and talking to people about our chatbot named Pressbot, almost seemed soothing to me. The idea of creating something for people to use with new technology, was something I could get behind. I looked into doing UX properly, I researched how to reap the most information from surveys and focus groups too — all because I like the idea of creating something that is useful to people. It was during this time where I realized this is more than just another sports chatbot, it’s about creating something for people and doing it thoroughly.
About halfway into the semester, we came across an issue that would change our project. The lack of communication with the Dallas Morning News stressed us out as a team, but when we spoke to our project lead at the news organization, it only got worse. Pressbot would become a messenger app that would keep fans up to date on the latest score of their selected football team. No longer were we doing autogenerated stores and as a group and our team became discouraged. As a group, we supported each other through this time. We had so many plans for our autogenerated project, but they all fell through. After time we prevailed, though, but not everything was perfect after this ordeal.
There were four of us in the team: Liliana, Connor, Erik and me. Liliana and Connor were the master coders — as I like to refer to them as- for Pressbot. Prior to our project changing, Erik would come up with a “formula” for generating sentences…leaving the marketing and other written projects for me. It got to the point where it became overwhelming and I knew Liliana and Connor were busy coding the project itself. I was upset Erik wasn’t putting much work into the assignments we needed to turn in, not once did he offer to take some of the workload off my plate. It wasn’t until halfway through the semester that changed and he began to offer his help, but by then most of it was complete. I learned that now I need to speak up much sooner, rather than wait until I begin to feel overwhelmed with projects. Thankfully, our leader Liliana helped with the issue, steering us to a healthy workflow within our group.
As I write this, I’ve never felt this confident for a project as I do now. The endless encouragement within our team helped me become a better speaker too. I’ve learned that working on projects for organizations aren’t about me, but rather the people who will use them. But, the most important thing I learned throughout this semester is that I’m open to creating more products or diving into marketing research for organizations I can stand behind.
Of all the classes within the Journalism school, this one pushed my creativity level and made me reconsider what I want to do after college. The exposure to UX, marketing research, and working to create something people will actually use, makes me want to stay in this line of work.
Ultimately, I’m happy that I learned more skills and I’m proud of our project. When we present this to the Dallas Morning News on December 12, I’m going to give it my all.
Again, I don’t like sports. But I loved working for Pressbot.
