Hi! We are HLN’s Product Team and this is home to all the cool stuff we’re inventing. Take a look around, read about our current projects and come back soon to check out what we come up with next. Enjoy!
UPDATE: We’re excited to announce that the HLN Social Index is a CES 2016 Innovation Award Honoree!
The HLN Social Index is a home-grown project we are really proud of. It’s a real-time, all-screens data visualization that ranks the top trends in conversation across social networks (currently accounting for Facebook, Twitter & Google, with more sources coming soon). The Social Index is powered by HLN's proprietary trending algorithm, together with editorial context that explains what’s behind the trend. With updates every hour, we think it’s your guide to never missing out on what the Internet is talking about, ever again.
This project is a great example of HLN’s social- and digital-first DNA. HLN TV started using the Social Index on air in December 2014. Today, if you tune in on a weekday between 1:30-2pm, you'll see a 30 minute segment of The Daily Share that’s entirely powered by the Social Index. You can of course also check in with the Social Index any time on HLNtv.com, and even embed it on your own site.
Every digital products team should have a brilliant data scientist (or 10). We are super lucky to have Miles Stanfield, a developer who thinks like an artist. Miles invented the algorithm that powers the Social Index. We’re also lucky to partner with JESS3 to make our vision come to life in such a beautiful way.
As with every work in progress, we have a dozen different ideas for where to take it next. Check back in with us soon! Data scientists, dataviz designers, and digital products folks: you always have an open invite to reach out to us via the comments section if you want to geek out with us!
And please check out the HLN Social Index on our home page on HLNtv.com!
We toss around ideas for products to each other and, in the process of our work, found ourselves repeating several mantras that helped in our everyday decision-making. We also believe that part of a great culture is being inspired by the space that surrounds you, and we are always looking for new ways to mix up our space and spread the vibe. So we decided what better way to share these mantras then to make some fun posters we could stick up around the office. A few designers pitched in and our mantra posters were born!
Designer: Kelly Byrom
Designer: Jordan Brown
Designer: Kelly Byrom
Our list of mantras keep growing, so there will be no shortage of creative pieces to line our walls.
Eyeo is an assembly that brings together an incredible set of creative coders, data lovers, artists, and other professionals to engage in enthralling talks, one-of-a-kind workshops, plus interactions with open source instigators & fascinating practitioners. This year I had the opportunity to attend and be inspired by the Eyeo Festival discussions. These are my takeaway thoughts and ideas.
This is my tribe
It was clear from the first day that my kindred spirits in love with graphics and developing meaningful user experiences through code were all here. Elusive, but I finally found them! One of the messages that infiltrated throughout several talks was about finding and working with people who are inspired and passionate about the same things as you and until you find them ... keep moving on.
What products should do
In every decision we make when creating user experiences using data, our ultimate goal should be making a product that connects with people and inspires them to think more about their own lives. Let’s make people reflect on themselves and encourage them to be nicer, more forgiving, more charitable ... better human beings. That’s how you really connect with people.
Data that users will actually understand and reflect on
James George: Imaging the Future
There were many discussions throughout the conference about how the most efficient processing of information is strongly correlated with making it relatable to the user’s own experiences. Users remember and store more when presented with story-form rather than facts because when listening to a story your brain recalls memories to try and make connections with what your listening and hopefully empathizing with.
We should exploit this when developing our own products. Use existing visual forms that users are familiar with already and introduce a new level of complexity on top of that. That way there is already a foundation of comprehension and understanding. It shouldn’t be a puzzle, it should be easily read but take time to soak in the entire message and meaning.
"When we talk to others, we assume that others understand what we are saying because we know what we are saying. But this is not the case. usually people bring their own attitude, perception, emotions and thoughts about the topic and hence creates barrier in delivering the right meaning."
"So in order to deliver the right message, you must put yourself on the other side of the table and think from your receiver’s point of view"
"Nonverbal communication helps receiver in interpreting the message received. Often, nonverbal signals reflects the situation more accurately than verbal messages."
Four factors that make a powerful visual
James George: Imaging the Future
1. Authenticity
Consumers want to believe that what they are seeing are real … what they see other people doing and how they’re acting is real.
The most communicative visuals don’t show a perfect moment, but a real moment. Hair isn’t perfect, lighting isn’t perfect. Real people, real moments.
2. Cultural Relevancy
The visual language changes faster today than ever before thanks to YouTube, Instagram and Facebook – we can no longer think in decades – i.e. The 50’s housewife, the 80’s business man. You have to keep up or your visuals will seem dated ... because they are.
3. Sensory Currency
This is a very strong trend right now. As technology takes over more and more of our lives, we’ve seen a desire for things that are ‘real’ like human contact and old-time, hands-on activities and professions. This trend combines nostalgia and a new appreciation for traditional skills, and seeing handmade products re-establishes the connection between maker and consumer.
4. Classic Storytelling Archetypes
The Explorer
The Caregiver
The Creator
see link
Collaboration is hard and you will make mistakes
Collaboration As An Art Form: Maria Scileppi
By it's nature collaborating with other creatives pushes us out of our comfort zone. It forces us to empathize and build upon their ideas; which aren’t always natural to our own thinking. It can be really hard and team dynamics and the creative process is everything.
What makes some groups perform better than others?
Strong social skills
Women in the group
Balanced conversations
note: smart and talented people don't always make the best teams. You need balance and emotional intelligence within the group.
Mistakes are going to happen with a group working on the same product. Even when the concept seems absolutely perfect, sometimes it’ll go wrong in the execution and the best thing you can do is embrace the mistakes. Own them and find a way to turn them into something really positive. Having a solution-oriented mind is the key to this.
Things to do for better collaboration
Collaboration As An Art Form: Maria Scileppi
Consciously choose to be open
Feed off of other’s passion
Look for opportunity
Ask yourself, what could we make together given our individual talents?
Agree to terms and rules as a group so all are accountable
Don’t let fear spread through the group. Fear incites panic.
Overcome your fear together as a group. It will bring you closer and create a rewarding bonding experience
Laughter is powerful tool for reseting and getting the vibe back if your group gets off track or positive emotions start to decline
Have weekly emotional checkin's not about work but about the people and how they are feeling
Culture is incredibly important to our team. We spend a great deal of our lives at work, and we’re lucky enough to like each other a whole lot. When we get to do our work in a physical space that inspires us & we’re taking good care of ourselves, we’re all happier, more creative and more productive. That seems like a no-brainer.
When our team first assembled about a year ago, one of the first things we did was to remove dividers and robot arms from our workspace in the newsroom. We moved from a cube layout to a more open layout, and added color and functionality with a ton of beanbag chairs, DIY standing desks, plants, and even light installations (this one blinks with real-time Twitter activity... and coming soon to our windowless newsroom, a cloud installation that tells us real-time weather info!).
When you do stuff like this, other people notice and there is a wonderful ripple effect that happens in the world. I love it when this happens organically, starting from something small -- like this pixel art cat wall we put up simply to brighten our corner. Take a look at this Poynter writeup about how it inspired our very own HLN Banksy, a mystery pixel artist who helped transform our entire newsroom.
A few other fun things we do together here at HLN:
Book club
Meditation classes
Knitting
Yoga
Walking meetings around the building
Health checks (bi-weekly meetings where we talk openly about what we’re happy/unhappy with)
For many of us who work in this space, life inspires work and vice versa. That’s why it’s so important to find balance. What are some of the ways you’re building a better culture where you work? I’d love to know!
HLN launched a new mobile game last month called Name This Tweet. It’s a pop quiz that tests your knowledge of the most popular tweets and who tweeted them.
Try it – it’s fun! namethistweet.com
It was the first time we’d built a mobile game for the web, and also the first product we built based on Twitter’s new Curator tool.
Here’s a Q&A with project leader Miles Stanfield, HLN’s data manager, about how we did it and what we learned along the way.
Where did the idea come from?
Sam Schenkman-Moore (Developer) came up with the idea for a quiz game to figure out the authors of tweets. He spit it out in a conference room one day and Sonia Kose (Designer) and Kelsey Zablan (Product) didn’t let it die. They immediately made a small Flinto prototype for it and the moment we all saw them, we were like “yeah we’re really gonna make this thing.” And you know, that’s a pattern with us. We’re more of a visual as a team. An idea doesn’t really catch on until we start seeing stuff.
Tell me about some of your development processes.
It became clear early on that embedding tweets for mobile users was a problem. The problem was that it took a while to load the tweet on the page because it takes longer for them to load from Twitter. You’d see whether you got the question right, but you wouldn’t see the tweet at first. It would come in later. We ended up cutting a few corners to get the gameplay working. We cached all of the tweets in our own database and we’re refreshing that data every 10 minutes so that the user’s profile image and other content in the tweet are up-to-date. Because of our unusual embedding methods, Twitter wasn’t able to get impressions on the tweets. They were kind enough to give us a custom piece javascript to embed on the page gives them the analytics they needed.
Are you working with Twitter's Curator tool?
We are. We're using Curator to gather the tweets for the game. One of the great things about it that made it perfect for this use-case was that it gives us a visual interface for editors to quickly see high-quality tweets that we’ve already applied filters on so that the tweets that come through are those that would work best for the game. For example, we're filtering out tweets that contain mentions, a links and all types of media because those typically won’t work well on the question or answer page. Either the content would give away the answer, lead users away from the game, or make the embed too long for a mobile user and cause them to have to scroll down to get to the “Next” button. Basically Curator is the CMS for the game.
Describe some of the technology you used?
It’s all built on Ruby on Rails. Same as our site and 99% of the other apps we build.
Tell me about the TV part?
After finishing the mobile version, it became clear that a significant driving force for promotion of the game would come from TV. So we needed to be able to play the game on TV as well as mobile. Because the game was built to be responsive to a mobile device, just simply putting it in a large touch-screen monitor like the magicwall wouldn’t work right out-of-the-box. Our magic wall is 1920x1080” - a HUGE screen. In order to not have to rebuild the most of the front-end part of the app or duplicate code that was already in place, I decided to make a query parameter change the layout of the game by media queries. So basically re-skinning it.
First I went up and measured the display pixels on the computer that is powering the magicwall in Studio 7. Then I changed all the heights and widths in media queries to make the game look good at that size. But it wasn’t just the size — we also needed the wood-panel background that the set uses. So I added that to this layout as well.
Note to self: we should build all future apps with magicwall media queries in addition to desktop, tablet, mobile.
What did you learn?
Ruby on Rails! I didn’t know a lick of it before I started on this project.
Twitter really cares about impressions.
Making a responsive experience for a game is so much more complicated than we initially knew. You never want people to have to scroll. That’s harder than it looks when you can flip horizontal/vertical on mobile devices. How did we cope? There are a zillion media queries that tell us which device and orientation people are using. We don’t do that on our website, for example.
There really aren’t a lot of mobile-web-based games. And maybe for a reason :)
Final Thoughts?
Personally, I wouldn’t recommend making a mobile web-based game. Next time let’s make a native ios/android app.
Want to know more about Name This Tweet and/or continue the conversation?Contact: [email protected]
Several weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference. For those who don't know, SXSW is a drunken spectacle where the princes of the Internet assemble to pick the next big thing. Oh, and by "lucky", I mean that I spent $900 of HLN's money to get a ticket.
I wasn't allowed into the meetings where a secret council decided "Meerkat" would join the ranks of "Snapchat" and "Gangam Style" as things the Internet would be very excited about. Had I been there, I might have pitched my startup idea, where people produced and socially post slightly different durations of video. Maybe next year.
But since I'm not MySpace Tom or a Winklevoss Twin, I was left to hobnob with the rest of the people who make things on the web. This meant everything: writers, engineers, managers, artists. These are old professions, forced to deal with a new, moving landscape. We attended a diverse range of sessions, united by a single thread: there is a fascinating and complex universe of things to try, and a dense fog obscuring which of these things will ultimately achieve your goals.
For example, you could throw your chips down on Facebook video, where you can grow your audience and make no money. Or accrue a PHD's worth of knowledge on a shaping an experience with personalization from artificial intelligence ... which might cost a fortune and never outperform more generalized strategies. Maybe invest in content instead? A nice theory, but the main success stories are small publishers with an intangible, unreplicable quality, or new media companies that take content from the public, and pay between next to nothing and nothing for it.
Pretty bleak, right? Believe it or not, this uncertainty is optimistic for publishers. The alternative is a certain slow decent into irrelevance. We still have many things to try and the work in front of us consists of filtering through these options and discovering how media works in coming years. Access to technology and publishing platforms has never been greater and no one has it completely figured out.
To some extent we are already succeeding in this new world. We are bringing content where our audience is, delivering content on social media platforms. We are re-working our web presence to respond to an expansive universe of devices. And we are exploring how to get HLN video on more screens than we would have considered possible years ago.
It would be nice if SXSW had given us a magic roadmap, but instead it is a reminder that there is too much for us to possibly do and we will have to be smart about what we pursue. We had great ideas before, and picked up more at the conference. Some will work, some won’t, and that’s how it is. We will not stop adapting until the robed elders in the secret council of the Internet declare us the new big thing.
- posted by Kelsey Zablan on behalf of Sam Schenkman-Moore
