Designing in the Open: Introducing CBC User Research Community
As CBC continues its digital transformation we need to privilege feedback from our audience on the products we’re creating. Involving users early in the process means we can identify whether we’re building the right thing and building the thing right! It allows us to test our assumptions and ensure that we’re creating experiences that Canadians find relevant, valuable and useable.
In order to do that, we must build and foster a community of Canadians like you: trailblazers, early adopters and testers who will be our advisors and our friends. It’s about building meaningful relationships so you can be invested in the evolution of your public broadcaster.
You are interested and curious about how we make digital experiences at CBC, and most importantly, you want to make an impact. You help us answer our big questions, test our hypotheses and provide ongoing feedback, so together we can create exceptional digital experiences for all Canadians. The goal is to start off on the right track, be transparent and seek your advice as we create these experiences for you, with you.
“Ta-da” moments — when you unveil a new product once it’s finished being built — are cool, but we’d rather show you the nuts and bolts and bring you in before it’s ready. We value faster and frequent feedback and learning as much as we can about the audience we’re creating these experiences for, which is all Canadians. This includes understanding what you need and expect from your public broadcaster.
How did we design the user research community?
Before we jumped to the drawing board, in the spirit of collaboration and openness, we reached out to some of our friends in the user-experience industry to learn from them. We found them nothing but welcoming, encouraging and inspiring. We’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the support of our friends at Asana, G Adventures, Gov.UK and The Guardian who opened their hearts and doors (literally!) and shared their learnings from starting up their own user research communities. This experience was invaluable for us and guided us in the right direction.
As a public broadcasting company, CBC has some unique challenges. We explored different options of how a community like this would work and fit into the context of CBC. We then conducted a series of interviews with some of the internal teams working on the product and content side of things. The goal of these interviews was to understand how we can create a user community to best support their work, while providing a platform for audience participation.
We also chatted with other teams within CBC who interact with our audience (that’s you folks!) through social media, email, phone, letters and even in person (lucky!). We shadowed them for a day, hovered over their shoulders and asked lots of questions! We watched, listened and observed, and again, we learned a ton.
We mapped out a few different use cases for the User Research Community, focusing on the workflows, different roles involved, internal and external touch points, how we would interact with you (our audience) and what you can expect from your contributions. Once we felt confident about our approach, we shared our ideas with our internal partners to communicate the value of this work and get their feedback. Since the purpose of the User Research Community is to support the great work that our product and content teams do, it’s crucial for them to believe in this idea and help shape it.
Getting their buy-in meant we could start thinking about logistics! We asked questions like: How will the User Research Community benefit Canadians? How do we invite them to join the community? How will they find out about it? How will we collect their feedback? How will teams benefit from the User Research Community, and how will they interact with the members of the community? And the most important questions: What happens to the information we collect, and how do we ensure that it’s secure?
We compiled a detailed list of requirements and set out to find the right tools for the job. We flip flopped between looking at databases that host survey panels and Customer Relations Management (CRM) tools. There are some great research panel tools out there that are robust and well-tested. As impressive as these tools were, we realized they didn’t exactly fit our needs, which is why we started exploring CRMs. The premise of the CBC User Research Community has always been and will continue to be relationship building. We found a great tool, but we can’t tell you about it just yet (even though we really want to) since we’re still negotiating contracts (shoutout to our friends in the legal department!).
Once we secure the contract, the hard work of actually creating the community begins! Did we mention that we have an awesome new person joining our team to help us do it? We can’t wait for you to meet her! We’re excited and a little nervous, but extremely pumped to get going. We’ll push ourselves, and we’ll learn a lot. It’ll be an interesting ride for sure, and we’ll tell you all about it right here. We hope you’ll join our journey to shape your public broadcaster of the future.
