Building the Lab website

To build the iMEdD Lab website, we followed the so-called “user-centered design” process, which places potential users at the center of web development, in order to make websites highly functional and useful to them.

During the preparatory and highly important stage of strategic planning, the mission and goal of iMEdD’s Lab were defined: to develop a website with primary content, designed to host interactive journalistic research and data analysis projects, to foster innovative thinking, give voice to people who are redefining the media landscape and introduce new forms and tools for material production, supporting every journalist or researcher who uses the website – with the aim of adopting and promoting the modern journalistic paradigm.

The target user groups and their specific characteristics were listed next: as one would expect, the primary target audience is the journalistic community itself, including professionals and students in the field, who are interested in modern techniques, good research practices, documentation and narration.

A secondary target audience is the wider research community, including any member interested in applying and incorporating timeless research practices and aspects of computer science and technology in journalistic production.

In order to work out the profile, the specific characteristics, the needs and expectations of potential users of the site in terms of its content and functionality, a quantitative and qualitative research of user requirements was designed and carried out.

With regard to the quantitative research method applied, data was collected through two, largely similar, closed-ended questionnaires, which were distributed electronically and were addressed, on the one hand, to the journalistic community and, on the other, to the wider research and scientific community.

More specifically, the two questionnaires included questions concerning:

• the demographic characteristics of the respondents
• their professional experience
• degree of familiarity with the use of computers and the Internet (in the case of members of the journalistic community), and experience in working with journalists (in the case of members of the wider research community)
• the skills considered necessary for journalists today
• respondents’ knowledge or understanding of data journalism
• desired content for the iMEdD Lab website
• expected website functionality/features

Data collection based on the questionnaire addressed to the journalistic community took place from October 3, 2019 to November 21, 2019. The questionnaire* was filled by 260 respondents (60.1% women, 39.5% men, 0.4% non-binary persons) who:

• belong to all age groups (35-44 = 33.7%, 25-34 = 27.5%, 45-54 = 20.2%, 18-24 = 10.1%, 55 and above = 8, 5%)
• reside in Attica (66%) and Central Macedonia (21%) – 4% of the respondents live outside of Greece and the remaining ones are dispersed in various Regions across the country
• are, mainly, holders of a bachelor’s degree (AEI/Former ATEI) (34.1%) or a master’s degree (31.4%) –15.5% of the respondents are graduates of Vocational Training Institutes (IEK) or other unaccredited colleges of journalism, 5.4% of them are high school (Lyceum) graduates, 4,3% are PhD candidates and the remaining ones are undergraduate or postgraduate students
• are mainly active journalists (57.4%), part-time journalists (17.4%), students (10.9%) or unemployed journalists (8.5%)

Data collection based on the questionnaire addressed to the wider research community took place from October 8, 2019 to November 26, 2019. The questionnaire * was filled by 40 respondents (29 men, 11 women), who:

• mainly belong to the age groups 35-44 (19 participants) and 25-34 (12 participants)
• mainly reside in Attica (36 participants)
• hold a bachelor’s/master’s degree (27 participants) or a doctorate degree (13 participants)
• are mainly employed in research centers/institutes (29 participants)
• have never – or hardly ever – collaborated with journalists (29 participants) or have worked several/many times with journalists (8 participants) – three people stated they work with journalists on a regular basis.

Alongside investigating user requirements through questionnaires, we also conducted qualitative research: in particular, on October 21, 2019, a focus group was set up, comprised of six members of the academic community of different universities in the country. Participants are specialized in various fields, ranging from journalism and digital media to visual culture, statistics and programming. The team focused on iMEdD Lab’s web content and concluded that the main content priorities should be:

• to include open, freely available data which will either be published or highlighted by iMEdD Lab after relevant research, review and use
• to publish primary source-based topics and case studies which are based on data journalism and, thus, help promote it
• to list the methodologies or tools used to produce all of the above, thus facilitating the journalist’s work in general
• to include material intended to advance knowledge in statistics and help to ease the understanding of basic statistics concepts

After collecting and analyzing the research data, we moved on to the design phase and subsequently wrote the website’s use cases, mainly oriented towards content organization and website functionality.