Venturing into the Discovery Phase of Design

Introduction

In our last sprint, we did a lot of planning and research to help us prepare for our kickoff meeting with the Death Penalty Information Center. In this sprint, we used insights from our kickoff to begin exploring our problem space.

Synthesizing the Kickoff Meeting

After returning from DC, our first step to truly digest all the information we had received from DPIC was to synthesize it all. We did this by doing a Walk-the-Wall activity using all of the artifacts we created with the DPIC team. In this activity, we used different colored sticky notes to represent Roses (good things to continue), Buds (opportunities for the future), Thorns (challenges or things that we might struggle with), and questions.

Our sticky notes around our Stakeholder Bullseye artifact we constructed with DPIC

We then gathered all of these sticky notes to do affinity clustering and create models of our understanding. Both of these activities led us to generate insights that summarized our understanding of DPIC’s project goal, key stakeholders, and direction for future research.

Affinity diagramming resulting from our Walk-the-Wall activity

Funnel model we created that helped us understand how policymakers are an indirect stakeholder

Insights from affinity mapping:

• Not enough clarity on stakeholder’s needs and how that translates to how they use the site.
• Policymakers are indirect stakeholders as opposed to active users of DPIC’s website.
• There is an opportunity for DPIC to control media narratives through human stories backed up by data.
• DPIC staying neutral both helps and hurts them and their broader mission.
• Does addressing DPIC’s backend address a user need?

Defining our next steps

Entering Sprint 2, the team came together once again to answer the question, what next? The background research and kick-off with DPIC helped us realize that we needed to engage in deeper research activities to gain a better understanding of the needs of the main stakeholders — policymakers, journalists, researchers, activists, and DPIC themselves.

Our new goal was to:

Uncover the types of information these groups seek out from DPIC and how those overlap, but more importantly, how that information can best serve them.

Outcomes for Sprint 2

1. Understand different stakeholder needs when navigating the death penalty space and how they overlap.
   Success criteria: A model that compares and contrasts stakeholders’ needs.
2. Get a better understanding of the problem we need to solve
   Success criteria: Identify a loose project direction to move forward with.

We plan to achieve these outcomes through multiple research activities:

For internal users: DPIC staff

• Conduct interviews to learn how they use and update information on the DPIC site
• Understand how they organize their data by looking at their analytics and backend data stores

For external users: journalists, researchers, activists, and the general public

• Analyze external artifacts to understand how the usage and reporting of death penalty data overlaps
• Identify, recruit, and interview participants to learn how they interact with death penalty information
• Develop and deploy a survey to learn who else looks for death penalty data, how they find it and what they use it for

Finding Overlapping Needs

To start our external artifact analysis, we first identified 3 main users of the DPIC site and census: academic researchers, media outlets, and activists. We then compiled about 40 different academic journals, media articles, and activist sites that directly cite DPIC data, and conducted a qualitative analysis on them. From this analysis, we were able to pull out patterns on focus topics as well as the data used.

Affinity mapping process to identify patterns and clusters of themes. Green represents media articles, blue is academic articles, and pink is activist sites.

Distribution of commonly used topics and data types found from our artifact analysis

This revealed some interesting observations such as the fact that there are not a lot of data types or topics that are unique to a single user since most of them sit at the overlapping areas. Additionally, the topic in which all 3 overlapped was “Disparities in the way the death penalty is applied”. With this in mind, we pulled out 3 key takeaways:

1. Academic researchers and activists have abolitionist agendas:
   These groups generally use DPIC data to make an argument for the abolition of the death penalty.
2. Media articles want sensationalized stories and headlines:
   Rather than making an argument, this group generally just wants to inform in a way that is more attention-grabbing to the public.
3. Most users go to DPIC to find 1) general death penalty information and 2) data on “controversial” topics:
   People turn to DPIC when it comes to finding information on topics within the death penalty that are more subject to interpretation such as exoneration cases, inequities in the application, and biases in the justice system.

Coming out of this activity, we have improved our understanding of both the type of data that users normally get from DPIC, as well as their motivations on doing so.

Redefining our Problem

After synthesizing these various research activities we realized we needed to redefine the problem we were focusing on.

Initially, we thought the problem was focused on making data manipulation easier for different users with different needs through the Death Penalty Census. We realized that the problem was much larger than that.

We found that there was a mismatch between DPIC’s services (mainly website and census) and the needs of different stakeholders when looking for information on the death penalty. This insight allowed us to reframe our problem space and come up with the research question:

How might we better understand what different stakeholders’ needs are when looking for Death Penalty information and how are these needs similar or different?

We will use this research question to guide our research in the next phase of our project.

Closing

We are currently taking our next steps and are in the middle of launching an Internal and External Stakeholder User Needs Study to help us understand what different stakeholders’ needs are and how they overlap.

For our internal study:

• we will be conducting interviews with staff members of DPIC who use their website as a tool to answer death penalty-related questions from the public and media.

Our goal for these interviews is to understand how DPIC’s website and census fit into their work on a day-to-day basis. In addition, we would also like to understand their pain points when using it.

For our external study:

• we will be conducting interviews,
• and administering a survey

targeting important external stakeholders like academics, activists, journalists, and members of the general public.

The goal of this is to understand how these stakeholders look for info on the death penalty and what they use that information for. We plan to use the insights from this research to further define our problem space.

Stay tuned to see what we find!

This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.