DESIGN STRATEGY + PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Helping Sweden's largest news organization thrive in the digital age
Dagens Nyheter (DN) is one of Sweden's largest and most reputable news organizations. Their daily morning paper has been distributed nationally since 1864 and their digital subscriptions are growing consistently.
Like most established news organizations they're facing an uncertain future. Papers that have been around for more than a hundred years are suddenly on the brink of bankruptcy after failing to meet the changing demands from a largely digital audience.
DN's editor in chief, Peter Wolodarski, brought me in to help the newspaper develop practices that will make the organization nimble and resilient and allow them to capitalize on changing technologies and reader demands, rather than defending a past long gone.
Going Wide
During a week in October, 2017, I trained 200+ staff members in the fundamentals of human-centered design. I developed a customized workshop centered around the question: "How do young people form a new opinion?" People from across the organization – journalists, editors, developers, business managers – worked on cross-functional teams and spent a day exploring this question through the eyes of young people they met on the streets of Stockholm.
Going deep
I also worked with a small team at the paper to develop deeper practices in user research. Our focus was, again, on DN's younger audience and I led the team through and in-depth user research sprint. We interviewed users, synthesized our findings, and laid the foundation for a larger project to begin in 2017.
