On January 8th we welcomed eight international participants to the final YourDataStories (YDS) evaluation session. The joint session between EJC and DW took place at DW’s headquarter in Bonn, Germany. The diverse group consisted mainly of DW journalists and a member of Digiwhist – an EU funded project YDS is collaborating with. The focus of this session was on evaluating the YDS platform’s functionalities in context of Use Case 2 (Tracking Development Aid in the Netherlands).
Evaluation Results
During the hands-on evaluation session the functionalities of the platform were presented. The participants also had the option to freely discover the platform and provide openly constructive feedback. We were specifically interested in feedback on functionality, bugs and technical glitches as well as user interface. Most of the feedback was very detailed, such as the wish that the story editor should also be viewable in HTML.
General Observations
The overall feedback was very positive. The participants appreciate the functionalities provided in the platform and were very active in testing the platform. Several participants stated that YDS has the potential to build a user community around it that leverages all the treasures that are hidden in the available data. Even though the general feedback ranged between good and excellent, there was also critical feedback. One participant identified a risk that the user might be overwhelmed and lose track while using the platform.
The main results of this event have been tackled by the technical partners in the aftermath of the evaluation session. If you would like to learn more about different evaluation sessions throughout the project and the overall results, take a look at Deliverable6.4.