Personal Wins!
Managed 2 month-long in-country research sprints
Led team of one research operations specialist and one visual designer + two teams of four local researchers
Brought clients along for in-country research, giving them the opportunity to hear from users first-hand and champion strategies moving forward
Team
Marielle Velander, Panthea Lee, Yunie Nurhayati, Paulus Dhanarto, Roby Purnawan, Iracema Marques, Daniela Félix Martins, and Adriana Alverez.
Partners
Wikimedia Foundation
How can the sum of the world’s knowledge be more relevant to and useful for people’s lives?
Background
With the world’s internet population growing quickly, the Wikimedia Foundation is eager to engage the “next billion” readers and editors of Wikipedia. But with an existing user base heavily concentrated in Global North countries, Wikimedia needed new strategies to move beyond the Wikipedia product and looked to Reboot to help the organization move towards an open information movement. And the Foundation knew it couldn’t develop this vision without a better understanding of how people around the world seek information and use the internet.
Results
This research contributed to Wikimedia’s 2017 Global Movement Strategy intended to guide the collaborative platform's growth over the next 10 years. Our work suggested that for the Wikimedia Movement, building a robust and respected destination for knowledge (Wikipedia) is no longer enough. In order to continue advancing its mission, the Movement must go from providing information via its platforms to enabling learning by serving as essential infrastructure in the global knowledge ecosystem.
Conducted in-country design research: Conducted observations, in-depth interviews, intercepts, and service trials to better understand information and internet needs, habits, and constraints of potential and current Wikipedia users in Indonesia (above) & Brazil (below).
Supported by local researchers: In both countries, we worked alongside local researchers. We started our sprint with an in-depth training in the methods in human-centered design. In exchange, researchers lent us their rich contextual expertise and lanuage (and cultrual) interpretation.
Daily Data Synthesis + User Persona Development: While in country, our team coded and organized research, developed frameworks to interpret data, and drafted user personas.
Developed Opportunities: Based on the findings, the team identified opportunities for Wikipedia to grow its reach and impact. Results included product, distribution, partnership, and communications strategies to better engage new readers in target markets, as well as ideas for better leveraging Wikimedia’s passionate global community in doing so.User Personas: Based on the research, we developed user personas to help Wikimedia better understand different user’s information needs, internet habits, and technology ecosystems.
Supported Decisions: We designed and facilitated internal discussions at the Foundation to explore opportunity areas for growing its global readership. We designed learning products to organize and emphasis key strategies, giving high-level decisionmakers clear visualizes to guide discussions as they integrated our research into their wider strategy.