I lead The Atlantic's efforts to study current and prospective readers and listeners' interactions with our journalism. Together with our product, editorial, engineering, and growth groups, our team is a strategic partner that prioritizes projects that are core to The Atlantic.

We use interviews, diary studies, usability testing, surveys, and observation to expand the reach of our coverage. Understanding perceptions of The Atlantic brand is central to our work. Our researchers help grow consumer revenue through web, print, mobile, newsletters, live events, podcasts, and more. We start by meeting current and prospective readers and learning what they need from our journalism:

Project: A public research project at New York University’s journalism institute to study how news organizations are diversifying their revenue, optimizing for trust, and encouraging members to participate in their journalism.

People: I managed the Membership Puzzle Project with Jay Rosen and Ariel Zirulnick. The project is funded by Democracy Fund, Luminate, and the Knight Foundation. 

With decreases in funding for news organizations and crises in public trust, we saw the need to create sustainable paths forward that are more inclusive of audience needs. Membership is one approach to revenue generation and public inclusion and has yet to be comprehensively studied. As research director, I led a global team of designers, reporters, and researchers working to create knowledge products and design principles for the news industry. 

At the Membership Puzzle Project, we:

• Collected what's already known about making membership work by seeking out the people who have deep experience with membership models (including members themselves). You can see details about our research collaborations with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the Global Investigative Journalism Network, the Tow Center at Columbia, and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin.

• Researched all the ways that community members can contribute, not just their money, but their knowledge and expertise. We offered a public database of membership models within news, the first such offering for program understanding and ideation.

• Funded innovative membership models that are being tested at news sites as part of a global experiment to identify best practices for sustaining independent journalism in the 21st century.

• Helped our editorial partner De Correspondent launch The Correspondent in 2019. The Correspondent will be an English language platform for unbreaking news and will launch in September 2019. Members follow correspondents who have self-defined beats or obsessions, varying from climate change to the future of education. Correspondents bring readers into the journalism process by sharing what they are reporting on and involving their knowledge during their reporting.

The Membership Puzzle Project will run until spring 2020. As the project synthesizes key membership lessons with journalism organizations around the world, we hope to learn what you know.

 Among the deep transformations in the business of news are the rise of behemoth social media platforms that dominate audience attention and shape the fate of many publishers; the destruction of a commercial model for supporting the production and dissemination of news; and the increasing prominence of one-to-one, digitally mediated relationships for sharing information.  

Amidst this, we see a long arc of digital transformation that is giving news publishers new tools to identify and build relationships with the audiences they serve. These new forms of engagement are not just suggesting additional revenue streams but redefining the practice of journalism, too. You can read more in the “Guide to Audience Revenue and Engagement” in English and Spanish by Elizabeth Hansen and me.

Additional writing on the topic includes differences between subscription and membership; what supporters of independent news say they want; and what we’ve learned from studying spaces outside of news. User Interface Engineering has made the webinar it recorded about optimizing news for trust freely available.

People: Subscribers and non-subscribers of The New York Times ages 18 to 35; design, newsroom and product teams. 

I joined the Times to elicit insights into our readers’ lives and needs. As a former reporter turned design researcher, I wanted to help advocate for readers who might benefit from our world class journalism. I joined and subsequently led an effort to interview 45 young news consumers. Some of the Millennials we met were willing to pay for our apps and digital access, but many weren't.

I wanted to better understand their decision making and brought a documentary videographer to visit nine interviewees for extended sessions. In going to their homes and accompanying them throughout their days, we were able to better understand their media habits, cost considerations, and interactions with news sources while commuting. The resulting production was an internal 15-minute film that highlighted non-subscribers’ behaviors and helped shape product outreach and UX strategy. My directors and I presented to masthead leaders, section editors, and reporters, several of whom subsequently commissioned user research work. 

The Millennial insights project represented our entry into ethnographic methods, which I was excited to expand upon with research into breaking news moments (an undertaking that was detailed recently by the Columbia Journalism Review). My additional work at the NYT included:

• Serving as the staff liaison between our qualitative research group and Newsroom Strategy teams;

• Planning and carrying out project-appropriate research methodologies, including interviews, participatory design exercises, card sorting, and diary studies (as described in this Nieman Lab article);

• Managing usability testing across mobile designs, home page prototypes, and interactive news tools for producers. This included developing discussion guides, planning site intercept testing, and moderating sessions using generative exercises where applicable;

• Analyzing themes with design and product teams. We jointly identified possibilities for prototypes and products and developed workshops to share our findings with the wider organization.

I collaborated closely with data analysts, designers, developers, product managers, and editors to conceive of and create tools for vastly improved experiences. At the Times I brought a storyteller’s sensibility, a rigorous approach to delivery, and an emphasis on usability and usefulness for diverse groups. (I also reported after my time on staff.)

 Project: Understand the motivations of early adopters of digital skillsharing tools, then use this information to help create easy online experiences for them.

People: Team at Mozilla Foundation in partnership with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; badge issuing organizations; learners the world over.

At Mozilla, we believed that learning happens over the course of a lifetime and frequently in informal settings. Yet many of these experiential and lifelong learnings were not being adequately captured. Digital badges could help capture some of these. Under a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla built the Open Badge Infrastructure, which made it possible for badges from different communities to be interoperable and shareable across the Web. 

These badges have been rigorously issued by formal and informal educational institutions, multinational corporations, industry associations, non-profits, and groups interested in professional development. We worked to connect 1 million people domestically with 1 million jobs as part of the Clinton Global Initiative commitment 2 Million Better Futures.

I worked between design, development, and product teams as the Foundation's first user researcher. I planned methodology and data collection, large-scale studies, and resources for qualitative and quantitative analysis. Our creative lead Jess Klein wrote that since my joining, "user research and testing [does] not happen in a bubble, but rather becomes completely integrated with our design and implementation cycles." Additional work included: 

• Collaborating with leaders in and newcomers to our distributed international ecosystem to map their needs. This resulted in the creation of a comprehensive set of user profiles that were used for the team's largest development undertaking, a technical toolstack for badge issuing cities called BadgeKit;

• Overseeing a logo redesign and site overhaul for the project's central online property, OpenBadges.org, with the design firm Ocupop. I led user inquiry and created content for Community.OpenBadges.org, our first centralized hub for community forums and interactions;

• Co-creating and hosting the Foundation's first research-focused weekly conference call, drawing an average of 20 highly engaged community members and experts globally each Wednesday;

• Moderating and presenting on open education and design research at South by Southwest as well as its sister conference, SXSWEdu.

Project: A new graduate course at the Stanford design institute (“d.school").

People: 45 graduate students across business, engineering, humanities, and education schools; industry partner companies.

During winter 2014 I co-created and taught a course called “Know Your Humans: Designing Effective User Research.” Together with health behavior designer Dr. Steph Habif, we launched curriculum in a new class format at the d.school: a pop-up in which instructors determine course content and the number of class meetings in a highly experimental style. Our #1 goal was to provide students with an arsenal of user research tools and tactics to help inform delightful products and services at the university and beyond. 

Our advertisement for the class drew three times more applicants than space would hold: "We’ll get you comfortable crafting questions, putting on observational and analytical hats, and asking how and why.” We explained, “You'll practice how to see and understand users’ small daily choices–the ones that other people might miss–to be able to design with those users. Students who take this class will be able to identify highly motivated users, practice keen observation skills, and have more insight about how to meaningfully impact the people they are designing for.” One woman came from Berlin and rented a room for a month just to be able to audit the course.

We designed “Know Your Humans" to be highly participatory and brought in two partner companies: the mobile STD status verification company Hula and a women’s intimate apparel organization in stealth mode. We selected these companies because their founders both highly value and regularly practice user research. They also represented topics that can be seen as sensitive and highly personal, which gave students the opportunity to plan interviews with questions that others might shy away from. Students were challenged to conduct ethnography work with people new to them; to develop empathy maps based on what they learned; and to communicate key strategic findings to company partners. We focused on translating information to product teams and executive leadership, as well as involving them in the work frequently. Cross-culture communication was also a main theme of the course. 

My teaching coach, an IDEO co-founder, was highly pleased upon observing a user recruitment lesson we’d planned and a live focus group that the students drew insights from. One student told us that the hands-on nature of the course made it the the best one he’d taken during his Stanford career. Several others are currently pursuing internships and careers in user experience research. Being both a practitioner and educator in this space has made my work a stronger asset to both the students we’ve served and my collaborators at Mozilla.

 Project: Production of live experiences with repurposed products.

People: Colleagues at Venables Bell & Partners; Pacific Gas & Electric; California men, women and children.

Almost everyone around me doubted that advertising could positively affect people when I started working for an ad agency. And when our utility company client diversified its renewable energy mix, we were nervous that any initiatives might be accused of greenwashing.

After weeks of late-night brainstorming, our team decided to introduce the company’s investment in renewables with a series of public pop-up cafés. With a tentative “yes” from PG&E, we partnered with ReadyMade magazine to create and place sod couches throughout the city for public enjoyment. 

As lead producer I pressed to collaborate with the Artist in Residence Program at the SF Dump to make furniture from (literal) local trash. A loved local coffee company supplied beverages and members of the PG&E team met with café visitors at parks and farmers markets. The experiences drew tens of thousands of people live. By creating engaging opportunities for dialogue, we generated much more positive interest from sustainability bloggers and more live interactions than a traditional ad campaign ever could have.

Project: Health reporting in Cape Town, South Africa.

People: Staff at Cape Times newspaper; interviewees; religious leaders; newspaper readers.

As a reporter covering efforts to control HIV and AIDS in South African townships, I regularly saw individual religious groups provide generous services for their communities. When I told my editor that I was surprised not to find interfaith organizations that were pooling their resources, he said: “But that’s just not how things are done here.”

Not quick to take him at his word, I spent the next month of weekends at Masses, mosques, and health conferences. I found a group of progressive religious leaders who had combined their health services and were willing to talk about their efforts for the Cape Times’ Saturday magazine. 

The feature that followed invited much more controversy than my other stories, but it excited a group of area imams and rabbis so much that they collaboratively appealed for and won grant funding to offer clinical care and counseling. 

 Project: Design for family reconnection in an age of digital overstimulation.

People: Stanford Product Design program; project partner Kyle Williams; participating families throughout the US.

In an always-on age, young people and adults alike are starting to recognize the negative physical and social side effects of their drive to be constantly connected online. Multimedia multitasking and motivation to check in—to the extent that primary school children have reported using their mobile phones to send upwards of 60 text messages a night after they’ve been sent to bad—are taking their toll.

In response, a fellow Stanford student and I created the outreach-oriented Presence Project. In visiting families in their homes, we found that time management and self-regulation were concerning around all members' screentime, not just children’s. I worked to understand the current ecosystem of people pushing this space forward across education, medicine, contemplative practices, sociology, and other fields. 

We prototyped and tested cloud congestion pricing, wearable meters, and other physical products aimed at long-term behavior change. But we learned that one solution wasn't enough for most households. We starting bringing physical toolkits, "Be Here Now Boxes," to families to encourage collaborative reflection and prosocial behavior. These tackleboxes include a combination of electronic and paper-based tools to inspire dialogue and action around digital device use. 

They kits were especially targeted towards families with four to 10-year-olds, an age range in which habits around interactive communication technologies are being actively formed for many children. Families found the kits to be fun to use, and most refused to hand them over at the end of month-long testing cycles.

Stanford Medical School is exploring licensing Presence Project tools for use in obesity and exercise research. While this high resolution prototype is not yet a market-ready solution, it is one step in the right direction towards bringing solutions to information-overloaded modern families.

 Project: Make it possible for tech entrepreneurs to share their stories in their own words, then make that content widely available for free learning.

People: Leadership of Women 2.0, an organization that works to increase the number of women starting high-growth technical ventures; up-and-coming and seasoned entrepreneurs.

My interest in technical equity was sparked by the discovery that less than 5% of entrepreneurs in the technology industry are women. Can’t be, I remember thinking. 

I joined Women 2.0 as an events production volunteer and suggested that we might use multimedia to reach more geographically diverse prospective founders. 

To encourage this entrepreneurship, I began producing “In Conversation,” a Women 2.0 video interview series that invites female CEOs and company co-founders to share their product development and startup growth advice. I’ve interviewed entrepreneurs as diverse as the creator of the world’s first major photo-sharing platform, a taxi-hailing app developer, and a publisher of books that consumers create themselves. Two years, 40 video interviews, and 50,000 video views since starting the series, I want to use it to show people what they, too, can create through collaborative technologies.