So, unfortunately, this week we had the last class from the Mozilla Learning Lab. Below are the three parts for my software proposal: MyStories, an open platform for news recommendation!

So, I'd like to thank the wonderful people who made this happen, the organizers Phillip Smith and Alexandra Samur, all the shepherds Jacob Caggiano, Lingsha Hu, Kate Hudson and Pippin Lee, and all my fellow learning lab participants! 
@Pippin Lee. Special thanks to you, really got me thinking on how to improve my idea by thinking in terms of a platform. I think it helped me to structure it better and improved its value. 
So, I would like to leave a final suggestion, the only one that I could think would have improved the learning lab experience: You guys should have made it longer! ;-)
Best wishes 4 you all!

This week Shazna Nessa and Mohamed Nanabhay  listed the variety of challenges that fellows will have while implementing something inside a fast-paced newsroom. I have never been in a newsroom but the challenges reminded me about my previous experience deploying 'paradigm shifting solutions' for traditional hectic large corporations like Volkswagen, BMW and others. It´s all hard to get people to collaborate. It's hard to get people to trust you. I think the only way to do that is to 'sell' a vision. And there is a long road to do that.

You can't be on your own, you need collaboration. To get that you need to build trust and trust comes out of results. Then, all we have learned and discussed in the first two weeks of the learning lab comes into play. Rapid iterations, testing with real users, user-driven changes, clear metrics and good communication are all precious tools I plan to use to gain trust and foster collaboration. My strategy is to start with a small step that is part of broader vision, gain trust and sell the vision to all the stakeholders that need to be involved to get things going. What is important to know is that stakeholders do not envision features, they envision results. And results may be different things like getting the job done ASAP, increasing page views, making more on ads etc.
My project, 'MyStories', is meant to address these challenges. It does not requires many changes in the flow of newsroom and provides a value proposition for both users and stakeholders in the news organizations. It can be implemented quite rapidly, tested with real users (perhaps limited to subset of the audience - to balance risk), adjusted through fast iterations and developed by open process. But, most important of all 'MyStories' is part of a much broader and, potentially, disruptive vision:

“I believe that HTML5, despite being a infant technology, has a lot of potential to revolutionize the user experience across the web and, specially, in news sites. These content producers sites can leverage current assets to create a awesome user experience and increase by orders of magnitude the user engagement if they aggregate web apps”

'MyStories' despite likely having flaws is  a start point to gather results that may present numbers to prove that. If users can have a great experience and use twitter or facebook from a news website, they may stay there longer.

The feedback I collected from 7 answers to my customer development form was encouraging and pointed out improvement points. It signalizes that the ability to 'in-place' react to discussion from friends in social networks related to topics present in the content they are reading might be a good value proposition. I will elaborate this in my final project.

This week all the project descriptions from the participants in the Mozilla Learning Lab were made available. Jordan has summarized and classified the project descriptions of the participants. I was also browsing it and I have uploaded it on Many Eyes. It is a great way to visualize and browse large texts. Here is a screenshot:

You can see it here

Providing the building blocks to construct awesome products. For me, that is what two weeks of Knight-Mozilla learning lab have been about. And it is being fantastic! This week Chris Heilmann gave us a great overview of where the open web is headed to. I was familiar with HTML5, but the examples were really eye-opening in terms of the new possibilities enabled by the technology (and best of all, based on open standards). The importance for publishers is huge because HTML5 makes websites far more interactive and users won´t need to leave their website. Despite having worked in the design of various products and being educated in the technology layers, this week was shocking for me. I was surprised when I learned the dimensions involved in designing mainstream products like Firefox. James Garrett introduced me to the idea of products having personality and creating social connections with people. And the importance of taking in account the emotional and psychological factors. I had never thought products beyond their raw functionality nor had I imagined all the user engagement phases and key aspects of creating a community around a open source project, like jQuery, as shown by John Resig. Thank you learning lab people!

So, first of all, here is my 250 character pitch for my software product, temporarily called “MyStories”:
“MyStories improves user experience creating personalized news feeds that he can follow. Users can read and respond reactions from his friends based on the news. Websites benefit from increased traffic, time on site, profile data and share-of-mind.”

Since my last post I worked on filling boxes on my canvas and I come up with a value proposition for both end users and news organizations. See it below: 

So, imagine this user, let´s call him Ted ;-). He is interested in:
- Boxing
- World news
- Media & Technology

As the user logged into the website using his online social identity, we can mine his interests in his profile and streams to construct a feature vector to personalize his news. See the mock-up below:
BTW: Hope it is okay to borrow a partner´s page.

Now, our HTML5 embedded application can load news tailored for this user so that it is easier for him to navigate and discover content. The user can also opt-in to post the recommended news stories to his wall so that he can easily get the main headlines on his social network streams.

The user can consult reactions from his friends related to the news. In the spirit of HTML5, aiming to make the news website of the future as social and interactive as possible we can imagine that the user can reply to his friends without changing tabs or leaving the website:

Additionally, we can think of various forms of increasing recommendation quality. We can collect behavioral data and we also can allow user to give feedback:

Those are just a few thoughts on how myself and a few friends would like to interact with a news website. One thing is for sure, HTML5 will disrupt the internet. Publishers will be able to deliver revolutionary, cross-device, interactive, social experiences. User won´t need to switch medias and engagement will grow. There is definitely a lot of opportunities here.

Be dramatic. Communicate. Prototype. Know your users. Iterate. The first week of Mozilla-Knight Learning Lab presented great thoughts on design thinking and product development by brilliant speakers Aza Raskin, Burt Herman and Amanda Cox. In this post, my objective will be to point out some complementary ideas, like business model design and customer development, and present first results towards my final assignment: A software product proposal “that will improve the way that online news is produced or experienced”. While having a complete business description by the end of the course might be too much, I expect to use what I have been learning, the community support and these related concepts to define, test, iterate and share my progress in this blog. 
To know how to get started is very important. So, my idea earned me a spot during the first phase of MoJo challenge. Now, I have to evolve from there (perhaps pivot). How can I do it? Well, customer development and business model design are two great frameworks for it, since they are built for rapid iterations and prototyping.

Well, I have some crazy idea but I must to go through a reality check to see if it will make sense in real world (likely won´t). Therefore, I make some assumptions like who are my users, what is the problem I solve, what is my value proposition, how I delivery the value proposition. The business model design is the standard to describe how these assumptions fit together. During the next days, I will work on filling up some important boxes on the first iteration of my business canvas:

As you may see, some boxes are already filled since they were defined in the briefing. My challenge now is to clarify my value proposition (something like adding more structure into news, not sure anymore) and have something testable and simple (as Aza says, finish the first artifact in a day). After seeing some inspiring examples like Politifact, I realised that  the use of news as structured data can be made useful but it does require a simple and tangible reason.

Then I will test it. Customer Development is the standard for testing business model hypotheses. In my case, it is key that I discover if my users feel my solution works for them. I will do that talking to some people in the industry (like Trina did, congrats). Also, for web apps, I should get my product in front of customers ASAP. Prototype. Essentially, I will start designing test cases for my value proposition and defining metrics and what constitute a pass/fail signal for it.

So, after I run my test, it will be time to learn something, check how my hypothesis changed and decide if it is better move on or pivot to a complete new idea. During the next days, I will share my progress towards my final assignment. Hope you found something interesting here! BTW: I would be happy to listening to your feedback regarding the process I intend to use to develop my project and the idea of adding structure to news.

This is the first time I blog! I am very excited of being part of the group of individuals selected for the knight-mozilla learning lab! Let's rock! You can check my demo here.