This week, a team from all departments within Thunderdome spent the day at an offsite brainstorming session. The question was simple: how might we inform our readers how they will be affected by the Affordable Care Act and what they need to do. The guidance was simple, too: think big, support each others’ ideas and focus on the users.
Laura Cochran began the day by asking everyone to take five minutes to design a cereal box toy for “children,” noting that the “children” included the President of the United States, a magician, a superhero and an emergency room nurse. The responses ranged from a list of questions (“What do you mean by design?”) to a small figurine made out of pipe cleaners. Each person who wrote something or made a list paired up with someone who drew or created something, such that the left and right-brained Thunderdomers were sufficiently mixed.
The pairs proceeded to brainstorm different ways of reaching our audience, as Laura urged us to think big and move quickly. At peak brainstorming, we were scribbling so fast on Post-it pads that I had barely finished writing “Tout video stream” before my teammate Matt Grisafi, Health and Food Channel Manager, was putting a Post-it showing “Q&As with doctors” onto the wall.
After brainstorming and clustering common ideas each team chose features to include in their storytelling platform. My group designed a website with various tiles that allowed readers to choose information pertaining to them, connect with others who had similar concerns and save information to read later, among other features.
The interesting thing was, despite the diverse makeup of the teams and Laura’s encouragement to think outside the box, there were distinct common threads in all three groups’ ideas. All were desktop sites with the option to work on mobile, all were visually oriented and all were capable of allowing the user to receive information tailored to his or her personal health needs. It was interesting to see how many Thunderdome team members had similar conceptions of what the Digital First Media user might be most receptive to.
That being said, there was one outlier: the group that put its creative juices to work by combining those features in the form of a digital board game mirroring the plot of the popular HBO show “Game of Thrones.” What better way to find information pertaining to healthcare concerns than to have each concern correspond with one of the seven kingdoms?