PROBLEM

challenge

How might we get our online community to engage with our content?

OUR RESPONSE

We created oftentimes lighthearted, sometimes self-deprecating cartoons for engineers that upped engagement by 8% on Facebook, and were retweeted on Twitter by popular accounts like @iamdevloper and made front pages of subreddits like r/ProgrammerHumor.

Entertaining

#OurskyCartoons aims to offer a dose of entertainment a day to the tech community.

educational

At times, the series teaches you something about tech.

Research

METHOD

Identifying opportunities
To start off the research, I decided to follow the Five Ws and one H method that was often mentioned in my journalism classes back in university. In this project, I focused on the four Ws and one H.
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Who are they? Who do they follow?
What topics or content do they like?
Where are they?
Why do they like the content?
How can I measure success?
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PERSONAS

Who are they?
I imagined the audiences based on our company strategy and existing clientele. Then, in order to identify the right audiences to target, I ranked them with a relevance/effort coordinate chart. I judged the level of "hanging" by how active and mature their communities were, and how accessible these communities were, and how much support I would get from other people in my own social or work circle.

Quick poll for my target audiences
I asked the developers and UX designers at the company about the platforms they were on and what they used it for. Because I wanted to find out the collective needs of users on each platform, and whether it correlated with our objective: getting people to engage with us. I decided to use Maslow's hierarchy of needs to sort the channels. Introduced in 1943, the psychology theory is a pyramid of needs that depicts human motivations. From there, I shortlisted the platforms that fulfill the social needs.

Narrowing down the platforms and targets
I chose to move forward with Twitter, Facebook groups, Instagram, and Reddit. Subsequently, after sampling the communities of developers and UX designers on the shortlisted platforms, I decided to focus my efforts on developers. There were larger, more active communities where I could source content ideas from. Furthermore, over 66% of staff at Oursky were developers who could make sure my content was appropriate and accurate.
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PLATFORM AND COMMUNITY ANALYSIS

What do engineers engage with the most?
After conducting audits on earned channels, I found that the top domains shared were Github, Medium, and mostly news media: nytimes, techcrunch, arstechnica, etc.

It is worth noting that there could be other factors that determined an article’s rank on an earned channel such as the domain, author, posting account, title, or even published time.
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BACK TO PERSONAS

Further narrowing down the topics with personas
Like news coverage, there could be a million ways of reporting a story. For instance, if it were about an earthquake, the angles could be the effects on the loved ones of the deceased or the causes of earthquake, etc. What guides the decision behind the choosing of an angle is the publication’s overall branding and strategy. More importantly, how the angle affects its readers.

To understand further about what would actually get our engineer community to step forward and engage, or find out our own "readership", I created 5 personas that encapsulated my findings and learnings of the nuances of the audiences.

Set our target personas based on their needs and our limitations
‍Due to the constraints of time and capability, I have come up with two criteria to help make a decision:

1. The content our audience is seeking could be created on my own
2. The content our audience is seeking would be easy to create

After fleshing out the nuances and needs of each persona, it was made obvious that Riley (The Hardcore Genius) was way out of my league while Pete (The Gold Starrer) would rather spend his time polishing his online profile, and thus they were off the list. I was left with Alex (The Funny Nerd), Phoebe (The Activist), and Tommy (The Student). I made a decision to go with Alex because Phoebe's content would be time-consuming. Meanwhile, Tommy was looking mostly for knowledge and informational content to help him transition into the field, which would be also outside my ability.

Ideation

TESTING

What should we create?
‍After reviewing the findings, hypotheses, and personas, as well as factoring in my own limitations, I came up with three ideas to experiment.
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1. Humor + comics + popular account or leaders
2. Criticism + humor + comics
3. Self-deprecation + comics

My first idea came from @iamdevloper, a popular Twitter account with 300k engineer followers.

My second idea came from my colleagues, who I often heard them complain about non-technical entrepreneurs or clients making unreasonable assumptions.

My third idea was a derivation of memes I often saw from the r/ProgrammerHumor subreddit. I had an impression that many engineers have experienced the cycle of not knowing what goes wrong with their code and not knowing why it works.

EVALUATION

Measuring the results
‍To measure the performance, I used reach and likes as KPIs. Meanwhile, I looked at engagement rate to gauge the quality of the content and topic relevance to the community. Finally, I took into account ease of distribution to predict how likely we could reach beyond our owned channels without additional costs. After proving that there was a bump in reach and engagement, we wanted to improve our cartoons to see how much further we could maximize our reach.
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iteratiON

Gathering feedback
‍I shortlisted a few colleagues that fit my descriptions of Alex and asked for their feedback. For each draft I prepared a short caption, just as what our audience would see. They were first asked what they thought the cartoon was about and whether what it implied was true without the caption, then they were asked again the same questions but were given the caption. After a few rounds, I discovered three most common feedback.

1. They had different interpretations before and after reading the captions
2. They misapprehended my meanings of the cartoons before they read the captions
3. They thought the cartoons were not technical enough

One possible solution for feedback one and two was to add more context to the cartoon so it could be standalone without a caption or further explanation. I can achieve this by:

1. Using multi-panel to flesh out an idea
2. Getting ideas from the engineers and involving them early on in the content creation process

For feedback three, I could also possibly solve it with my second solution above for a more developed idea or even storyline.

In the end, as improbable as it seemed, we got ideas from some developers, but it was by no means frequent. In order to keep a consistent stream of ideas and content, I also started taking notes around the office. Luckily, it was an open office and it was in the culture that the developers’ daily activity was gather around in front of one person’s desk and discuss code and logic. When I had an idea or questions thereof, I would invite them in the process to build upon my idea.

"8:30AM AL: Peter's heading over to the hospital with the wife."
"Peter's having a baby." "Wow!" "Whoa!"
"It was finally deployed!" "Ha!" "Haha!"
"Technically, he should have already deployed it 10 months ago. He's launching today!" "That's true."
I've gotten the permission from Peter and his wife before the making and publishing of this cartoon.

After seeing an even more heightened interest in the cartoons on our Facebook account, I increased our coverage of topics as well as our exposure through other platforms.

"We increased our build release productivity by 400%!"
"How's that possible?"
"I fired the QA team."

"When a QA tester goes table shopping"
"I am ready to buy this table!"

Reflections

key Learnings

There are lots of similarities between creating content for an audience and designing a product for users. They both involve research and an understanding of the needs of the audience, setting goals, making reasonable hypotheses, evaluating and measuring the results, and refining based on audience or user feedback and observations. During the process, I have learned a few things that were crucial in the success of the content.
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The importance of personas
‍Although I was lucky that I found people that were similar to my target audience in the company who I could reference, personas were crucial in my decision-making process, and helped expanding my reach beyond a Cantonese or Chinese-speaking audience.

‍One thing at a time
‍In an ideal environment, I would have the capability and resources to juggle multiple things and increase my chances of finding a winner(s) to focus on later. But working in a no-budget environment had taught me how to identify my limitations and constraints early on. Removing distractions was an effective way to help me stay focused.

‍Ask for more feedback, sooner
‍I struggled to show incomplete work to others, particularly when I was only experimenting my ideas for the first time, not knowing whether I could carry out the design outcomes I had imagined. I learned that my ideas were never the same after speaking to different people. The feedback was what led me to the final cartoons that yielded great results; the results were the outcome of constant listening, rethinking, and changes.