Crosstown LA is a data-driven non-profit news organization run out of USC Annenberg. They use a combination of technology, journalism, and design to make publicly available data, like that of the Los Angeles Police Department Crime Dataset, publicly accessible data.

In the year that I worked at Crosstown, I went from designing cover art and data visualizations to leading a team of designers, establishing a brand identity, and creating a new product.

Establishing an identity

I started off at Crosstown creating cover art and data visualizations for a number of different stories. Pretty early on, I began to experiment with different styles for the story art until I settled on a style that the team and I were really happy with.

I saw this as an opportunity to clarify and simplify Crosstown's branding, so I created a style tile for the designers to use that would make it easier to create peripheral marketing material and additional designs.

Organizational changes

At this point, the team had fully embraced the new style and was using the style tile regularly. By reducing the amount of time it took for designers to make decisions around chart design and graphics, we were able to notice other problems we had been experiencing in the editorial > design pipeline, particularly:

• Reporters weren’t working closely with the designers assigned to their story, and miscommunications were very common.
• We were making data visualizations that didn’t add any value to the story the reporter was telling, which both wasted resources and made our stories harder to follow.
• Designers were making an average of three revisions to their work (data changes, story changes, and creative changes) that could have been avoided. Sometimes, the editor would have a designer start working on a story before the reporter knew where they were going with it. When these stories or visuals were scrapped, the company was wasting money and hurting team morale.
• Poor communication meant that many of the reporters didn’t know the names of the designers working on their stories.

I created a team hub and project management pipeline on Notion for our designers and reporters. The page established a process for reporters, editors, and designers to work together more efficiently and encouraged designers to take on a more significant role in the editorial process. As a result, designers rarely had to scrap their work, and the two teams grew really close.

In addition, I worked with the reporters and other designers to create a set of templates to use as a starting point for basic charts and graphics in order to allow designers to spend more time telling stories creatively and less time repeating themselves.

Breaking into new areas

After working on story art and branding for a couple of months, I approached my boss with a new product idea: we would use our existing technology to create an automated newsletter that could send subscribers regular updates on crime in a particular area. I outlined my idea in a couple of quick sketches and wireframes, and he really liked it.

He pitched it to Google a few weeks later, and we were selected by the Google News Initiative as a recipient of their North America Innovation Challenge. This grant allowed us to pursue the idea and build it over the following year.

My challenge then was to get a team of journalists, editors, engineers, professors, and designers onto the same page and acquaint them with the design thinking process in order to successfully bring our product through definition, ideation, research, design, development, and eventually to market. It was a great opportunity to put my degree and experience to the test and guide our team into the realm of product design.

I worked closely with Crosstown's founders and employees to define our mission, problem statement, and goals before we dove into our user research. We used these to create a questionnaire, reach out to people who fit our target audience, and conduct our initial stakeholder interviews.

As I took on a leadership role in this project, I hired and onboarded additional designers to take over story art and redesign the website to work with our new design system.

After synthesizing and presenting our findings from the stakeholder interviews, I wireframed, mocked up, and prototyped an MVP to test and present to Google in May. I was able to run several user tests in-person before the pandemic hit, and we were forced to rethink our research process and timeline.

After I conducted what user tests I could, I turned my attention to the new design system our newsletter (and eventually our website) would take on while our developers worked on bringing a working prototype to life.

With support from my manager and team, I left Crosstown in May of 2020 to work at Apple as an interface design intern. I'm proud of the impact I was able to have at the small startup, and am excited to see where they take the platform and newsletter next!

What I learned

I really loved my year of working at Crosstown. I learned that I work best on a team, but that being on a team doesn't keep me from asking questions, taking initiative, and taking on responsibility. I also love solving problems and will get very invested in the success of my coworkers and the company I'm working at. I enjoy working at a faster pace, and am especially productive when I can create healthy work-life boundaries. I learned a lot about user research, user experience design, and the design process, but most of all, I learned how to communicate the importance of these things to people with different backgrounds. Working directly with reporters, engineers, and a professor (who has worked in the journalism industry for a very long time) pushed me to stand up for my ideas and pitch them to people with different values, expectations, and assumptions.