Blog: We’re looking for volunteers to help improve MarylandReporter.com

At MarylandReporter.com, we make decisions based on facts and educated guesses. We definitely prefer facts.

The stories that you read are all based on facts. As journalists, we research topics and ideas. We check and double check tips, legislation and public records. We do our utmost to make sure that our reporting is based solely on what’s verifiable.

As for the way that we present stories to you and the design of our website, however, that’s based on educated guesses.

At the beginning of the year, we redesigned MarylandReporter.com as what we thought our readers might want to see. We used what we knew about our readers and their preferences to guess the best way to put things together on our site. We keep a close watch on our site numbers to try to figure out what’s working and what’s not.

However, nothing that we can do is better than a guess. But we want facts about how people use our website, and we need your help to find them.

We are conducting some user tests to find out how people use our website. We want to find out what people do when they get to our site, and what they don’t do when they get here. We want to know what we’ve been doing right, what we’ve done wrong, and what we could do better. And we want to use that information to make our site the best it can be.

We are looking for some volunteers to participate in the user tests. These volunteers would let someone watch them use MarylandReporter.com, then talk about the site afterward. And that’s all. Your commitment would be spending some time looking at our site the way you usually do in your home, office, or wherever you normally access MarylandReporter.com. It may not seem like much, but it will help us get the facts we need to make the site better.

If you would like to volunteer, e-mail Megan@MarylandReporter.com for more information.

About The Author

Len Lazarick

len@marylandreporter.com

Len Lazarick was the founding editor and publisher of MarylandReporter.com and is currently the president of its nonprofit corporation and chairman of its board He was formerly the State House bureau chief of the daily Baltimore Examiner from its start in April 2006 to its demise in February 2009. He was a copy editor on the national desk of the Washington Post for eight years before that, and has spent decades covering Maryland politics and government.