Writegood: Helping charities write engaging stories
What problem are we trying to solve?
This week we’ve been working on Writegood which is a storytelling webapp proposal aimed at charities and social good organisations that might not have access to a copywriting resource and need a helping hand with structure and plain english guidance. We aim to solve three problems; the “blank page” problem where people can feel overwhelmed when facing an empty Word document, how to structure a story in a way that’s engaging and useful and also how to create stories using multimedia.
Which part of the company vision does this relate to?
“Helping our clients use best practice from our industry” — Copywriting
“We design prototypes, run experiments test things and learn.” — We are building a paper prototype to test out our ideas.
What are the possible solutions?
We are designing a text editor that charities can use to write stories. To solve the blank page problem, the writing will be done in blocks using a Typeform-style focus mode. We will provide guidance and help tips inside the editor. Not many charities have professional writers, so Writegood will provide advice and checking against basic grammar rules and Plain English guidelines. We started out thinking that we would create a tool that could tell lots of different stories in different ways, but that was causing us to lose focus so we decided to only look at text-based stories about people for this version.
Who was in your team and what was their role?
Our team was mainly Carrie and Chad, with Amy helping out on Monday and Iain providing advice where he could. Carrie made our microsite and did a lot of the drawing for the paper prototype, Chad did some of the first wireframes and most of the documentation writing.
What were your assumptions about the solution that you plan to test?
Our assumption is that charities want this level of help and guidance with their writing. We are also assuming that they mostly use text-based communication online, and that they are interested in writing stories and case studies.
How did you build your prototype?
We decided to build a paper prototype. We thought that this would be the quickest way to show some of the more complex interactions, and we can use it later if we want to do testing with real users. We started by using Balsamiq to talk about our ideas.
After we had a solid idea, we wrote a brief script and starting drawing out our pieces. We set up a makeshift filming rig using some stools, a coat stand and a mobile phone.
Do you have any test results yet? If not what’s your plan?
We have built a promotional microsite (http://yoomee.github.io/team-storytelling). This has a link to a questionnaire that will gather information about how charities use the web to generate content, and what they think the barriers they face are. It also has a link to a video of our paper prototype with a feedback form. We will know if people are interested by how many people watch the video and feedback.
What have you learned?
We’ve learned a lot about online writing tools and have written a document explaining what we looked at and what features they have that we might want to use. (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k2169EAukYHLTR-HshJqOXMrMiWhmyld3BO791vqkOA/edit?usp=sharing).
We have learned about making an interesting paper prototype. We took a lot of influence from this old video about an email client paper prototype. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrV2SZuRPv0).
We learned about the Plain English campaign, and that they have a lot of really good resources we can use to verify the user’s output. This will help us to guide users to create accessible content. (http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/)
Do you know who this is for yet?
This is for charities and other non-profit organisations that don’t have much time or resource to write really engaging content. We are still undecided on where the tool will live; whether it should be a platform like Medium or a standalone web app where users can export content to Wordpress or similar.
Do you know what to do next? If so, what?
We need to gather information from the questionnaire on the microsite. If people respond favourably to the idea, we could look at building a lo-fi HTML prototype, or doing user testing with the paper prototype. We haven’t spent much time this week looking at the technical build, so that is something we might need to focus on in order to show that this idea is buildable with a sensible level of resource.
We need to think about how we want to create a full product based on the tool, and how we would make money from it. Possible ideas are to have a free basic tier for small charities and then a “premium” tier with features like work offline, or more export types.
