Emma Dessau is the Senior Producer of POV Digital. She is currently working on an independent project — a mobile interface and story platform to help people deal with social anxiety by finding media that helps put their experience in perspective. This is the third in a series of blog posts on her process creating a platform to support mental health through art, storytelling and software. Read the other posts here and here.
In addition to crowdsourcing, I’ve been slowly gathering examples of #mediathathelps me cope with social anxiety — that I think might help others, too — for about a year. I’ve made notes on my phone, computer, in countless notebooks, e-mail task lists, text messages, G-chats, Slack channels, and other, less traceable places, like real life conversations.
While preparing to build a prototype for this project, I’ve combed through all of these places and organized what I’ve gathered into a spreadsheet to create a starter library. After taking stock of the assorted titles, links, sources and vague notes, I reviewed my persona and user stories, and evaluated the scenarios to begin creating a taxonomy, defining the terminology, categories and tags I’d need to turn this messy list into an organized database.
I should say here that my model for this is POV’s website infrastructure — a lean system of spreadsheets, exported as JSON files — and WordPress. The POV Digital team migrated from an antiquated content management system in 2015, removing bad code and stripping down the critical information to an easy to navigate format. Through that project, I came to thoroughly appreciate the power of spreadsheets.
From here on, I’ll call the library of media the “Resource Library”, the sheet with categories the “Library of Terms”, and the sheet with tags the “Library of Tags”. I worked again with my collaborators Marie McGwier and Jackie Benowitz to define terms and roles of media formats, categories and tags we’d use in the database.
Format: Audio or Visual?
The first distinction the web app will need to make for the user is whether or not they can listen to audio. For example, if a person is out in public and wants to use this web app, only to be offered a podcast or a video — and they aren’t looking to go outside or to the bathroom to put on some headphones — it’s already not helpful. So, the first level of organization in the database is “Audio or Audio/Visual” or “Visual – Anything without audio”. In the Resource Library, we’re using the words “audio” and “visual”.
Top Level Categories
Once the database can be filtered by whether media requires audio capability or not, the user is asked more specific questions about the kinds of media they might find helpful. Using information about gathered from an exploratory survey to learn more general information about people’s experiences with social anxiety, we came up with 11 “Top Level Categories” to sort by:
- Video
- Music
- Spoken Word
- Noise
- Interactive
- Photographs
- Art
- Memes and GIFs
- Long Form
- Short Form
- Interactive
As more media is added to this spreadsheet, we can add Top Level Categories to both the items in the Resource Library and to the Library of Terms to be consistent and keep track of the terms we’re using. Media can fall into several Top Level Categories — in the Resource Library, they will be entered in the same cell, separated by a comma.
Subcategories
Here we broke down the Top Level Categories further. There will be a lot of Subcategories, and some will appear across multiple Top Level Categories. For example, media with the Subcategory “comics” could fall into “Art”, “Long Form”, “Short Form” and “Interactive”, as could a Subcategory of “fiction”. Keeping with the format for Top Level Categories, several Subcategories can be entered into the same cell, separated by a comma.
Tags
All of the Top Level Categories and Subcategories are used to classify the format of media, rather than describe the topic or theme. This will be the role of Tags. For now, each piece of media can have up to five Tags. In the Resource Library, we created five Tag columns and created a dropdown list using data validation to link the text entered here to the Library of Tags. Because there can be an endless number of Tags, I wanted to add a failsafe to prevent new Tags from being added to the Resource Library without being recorded in the Library of Tags. If an incorrect Tag is entered, or something is misspelled, the cell will read as “invalid”.
For now, as we work on the infrastructure and UX of the web app, I’ll keep adding to this database and taxonomy. Once it’s time to export this information and add it to application, we will use something like this Export Sheet Data Google Sheet Add-On to compress into a JSON file that can then be easily updated when we’re ready to add new resources to the web app. Later on, when the app is launched and users can upload their own recommendations, chances are we’ll have to create a different system for categorizing and keeping track. In the meanwhile, this is a straightforward, manageable system to use while I continue crowdsourcing and scrounging around for great resources.
Do you have any examples of media you’ve come across that helps you understand, manage or contextualize social anxiety that you’d like to contribute to this project? Please consider filling out this survey.
