To build upon user-centered design methods, we used a collaborative and multi-modal approach to involve users early in the design process for a website. This article presents our methods and results and addresses the benefits and limitations of the Collaborative Prototype Design Process (CPDP), including ways in which this new method can be implemented. The CPDP is an innovative approach to user-centered website design that emphasizes collaboration, iterative testing, and data-driven design. The CPDP balances the power and needs of users with those of designers and, thus, enables design teams to test more tasks and involve more users. We divided our initial team into three independent design teams to separately profile users, test usability of low-fidelity paper prototypes, and then create and test usability of resulting wireframes. After completing the user-centered design and usability testing, the three teams merged to analyze their diverse findings and create a final prototype.

Mobility and location-awareness are pervasive and foundational elements of contemporary communication systems, and a descriptive term to synthesize them, “locative media”, has gained widespread use throughout mobile media and communication research. That label of “locative media”, though, usually gets defined ad hoc and used in many different ways to express a variety of related ideas. Locative features of digital media increasingly have changed from visible location-driven aspects of user interfaces, such as check-in features and location badges, toward more inconspicuous ways of relating to location through automated backend processes. In turn, locative features—whether in journalism or other formats and content types—are now increasingly algorithmic and hidden “under the hood”, so to speak. Part of the problem with existing classifications or typologies in this field is that they do not take into account this practical shift and the rapid development of locative media in many new directions, intertwining ubiquitous digital integration with heterogeneous content distinctions and divergences. Existing definitions and typologies tend to be based on dated practices of use and initial versions of applications that have changed significantly since inception. To illustrate, this article identifies three emerging areas within digital journalism and mobile media practice that call for further research into the locative dimensions of journalism: <em>the situational turn in news consumption research</em>, <em>platform-specific vis-a-vis platform-agnostic mobile news production</em>, and <em>personalised news</em>.

On Saturday, 13 January 2018, residents of Hawaii received a chilling message through their smartphones. It read, in all caps, BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. The message was mistakenly sent, but many residents lived in a threatened state of mind for the 38 minutes it took before a retraction was made. This study is based on a survey of 418 people who experienced the alert, recollecting their immediate responses, including how they attempted to verify the alert and how they used their mobile devices and social media for expressive interactions during the alert period. With the ongoing testing in the United States of nationwide Wireless Emergency Alerts, along with similar expansions of these systems in other countries, the event in Hawaii serves to illuminate how people understand and respond to mobile-based alerts. It shows the extreme speed that information—including misinformation—can flow in an emergency, and, for many, expressive communication affects people’s reactions.

Proximity has helped practitioners and scholars to determine newsworthiness for generations. Emerging mobile technologies, though, with contextual-awareness capabilities, have been complicating many of the related issues and expanding the realm of journalistic content-as well as conceptualizations of timeliness-through growing digital tethers to place and use of that material in place. Those evolving complexities include the increasing possibilities for journalists to make connections to contemporary audiences through the customization of content based on matters of user location. In turn, where an audience member is located when media is delivered can matter greatly. Geolocation metadata has become ubiquitous and media delivery systems can sort that data to customize user experiences based on place. In terms of such tailoring, mobile devices allow novel kinds of personalized connections to journalism, prompted by a geographical nearness to physical stimuli. In response, this study examines the potential of proximity for impact on key factors of engagement, through the involvement, social facilitation, and satisfaction of users. This conceptualization of mobile journalism shows that media designers now not only can know precisely where their particular audience is but also adapt their messages to the situation as a way to generate more engaging experiences.

No abstract