I spent the weekend working with some awesome journalists, designers and technologists at #SNDMakes Designathon on story forms in Indianapolis. It was a whirlwind of great ideas, cool people and interesting prototypes.
My group, Team Pink, designed Sluice.js, a proof-of-concept node.js app that surfaces social conversation about specific ideas within a story. As we create more complex stories online, it often becomes difficult for users to understand the particular topics within a story that interest their friends. We want to help surface those ideas to better integrate conversation within storytelling and to further engage users within editorial products.
If developed into an actual product, Sluice could also help editorial teams get granular social data on their work and improve taxonomy by dynamically generating tags and topics based on how the story is discussed in social media. Understanding what points truly matter to users can help editorial teams improve future coverage decisions.
Building out Sluice would require some serious work with natural language processing and robust integration with social APIs (aka stuff that we didn't have time to do in a weekend hack). Our prototype used only a small dataset and hand-selected, rather than programmatic data analysis. (Also, full-disclosure, I need to go back and make it responsive.) I think there's great potential for a tool that could improve storytelling and the social news environment by closing the feedback loop around ideas within stories.
I had an absolute blast this weekend, and I left smarter and more invigorated about the untapped possibilities of online news design. All of the prototypes that came out of the event were terrific. Check them out:
Backstory: Gives users context on a story. (Blog post from Mike Swartz explaining the project.)
Skim: Helps users skim longform stories on mobile.
VideoSlider: Allows users to scan long-form video content. (Works best on desktop.)
PS: My teammate Cory wrote a great recap of the weekend and the importance of building community over at the Vox Product blog.
