September 2020 - May 2021
University of Maryland (UMD) Project Team: ****CJ Huang, Ebrima Jarjue, Emily Chambers, Jay Miles, Julia Kerns, Shenghan Gao
The Library of Congress wants ****to reach new audiences and develop new ways of interacting with its digital collection of historic newspapers, Chronicling America (ChronAm). Chronicling America is the Library of Congress' digital collection of over 17 million digitized American historic newspapers from 1789-1963.
The UMD team ran a series of five design sprints between September 2020 - May 2021, each lasting 4-5 weeks total. Our sprints started with a challenge that the team needed to solve and a set of expected deliverables that we would present to our client.
Goal: Set the long-term project focus by identifying our target audience and product vision.
Delivered: Nine different proto-personas describing users’ drives, goals & needs, challenges & hesitations, and scenarios for each.
Outcomes: The Library of Congress expressed an interest in focusing on two specific proto-personas for the team to research and design for in Sprint 2: The Lawyer/ Professor and The Natural Historian
Identifying the Problem Space After meeting with our stakeholders from the Library of Congress, the UMD team gathered our notes and affinity-mapped nine different groups. We generated How Might We notes for each group and decided that our research needed to focus on the group with the problem area:
“We need to understand our current users in order to understand our potential users”
Exploring New User Groups We started the process of reaching new audiences by surveying groups of users interested in specified fields. I focused on reaching out to three specific groups:
<aside> 👋 My Contributions: With these groups in mind, I reached out to professors within relevant UMD departments, museum professionals from the Baltimore Museum of Art, and personal connections to users interested in genealogy.
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