Visual Blogging: Activity Centered Design

Imagined Activity: Searching for a Local Birth Announcement
Assumed steps:
1. Log on to newspaper’s Web site
2. Locate navigation that will take me to my county’s “News” pages
3. Get to county-specific information and locate birth announcements
4. Scroll to approximate date of birth and scan for parents’ names

Actual Activity: Searching for a Neighbor’s Birth Announcement on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Web Site
1. Log on to www.jsonline.com
2. Use the search function on the top nav bar and enter “Birth announcement”
3. Use the Article Archive Search to find a birth announcement run in the previous 14 days. For birth announcements prior to that time, access the paid archive service.

I guess it’s pretty obvious that the steps I imagined using were not the real steps I had to use to navigate through my local newspaper’s site. The unexpected detour that surprised me most was that the birth announcements as well as the obituaries were not organized by county in the same way they organize news articles.

I think that newspapers incorporate a fair amount of information that would be best organized by “county”. In addition to birth announcements and obituaries, real estate and rental listings would be two more categories of information to consider for this schema.