CONTEXT

In my design class in Spring 2017, my team and I was assigned to tackle the problem of how we might provide unbiased news for busy people. While we had freedom to choose our own topic after completing the process of concept convergence within our groups, I decided to continue to focus on this topic; especially in the wake of the 2016 presidential elections, I was interested in doing a deeper dive into this problem and its potential to affect social media.

This project was completed within a timeframe of 10 weeks and involved interviews, ideation, and prototyping.

defining the problem

Sensationalism and partisanship is rampant in all corners of the media, and it’s defined our elections for the past few decades. More importantly, it has driven a huge wedge between people who are in opposite sides of the political spectrum, and has contributed to a population that forms their opinions from half-baked news stemming from poor journalism.

Nowhere is this more apparent than Facebook, where a large portion of the population receives their news, biased or not. Thus, I have decided to base my prototype solely in the medium of Facebook, and have designed a solution that addresses not how biased a Facebook article may be, but rather one that allows users to realize the significance of fact-checking and develop an awareness of potential credibility issues within their chosen news source.

I think that we get a lot of wrong information - because we get so much information in just one day - that there is definitely bound to be something false in that.

The way that things are portrayed from one source to another - it can really be night and day.

The above quotes reflect a few of the pain points that our interviewees brought up within their interviews. Additional pain points included:

• Clickbait on Facebook timelines

• Being bombarded by news 24/7

• Difficulty in checking which news sources are reliable

After conducting our interviews however, we pinpointed several key insights that would later define our solution.

concept convergence

While we conducted our interviews with our original theme in mind, we quickly realized that almost no interviewees brought up “time”, and thus redefined our goals to focus on bias instead. Some of the ideas we came up with were:

• Facebook app that rates the credibility of every news source, and provides alternate sources

• An email list subscription that aggregates top headline from credible news sources and allows users to filter by topics

• A website that provides opinions from professionals in different fields like economists, political scientists, etc, that would be organized by tailored topics.

individual secondary research

While people usually use a variety of sources such as Twitter, television, and newspaper, I wanted to focus it on only one popular online medium. I noticed a common trend on Facebook: the first comment would often be just a user summarizing the most important points of the article (along with a chorus of “thank yous” and “i needed this” following behind), and I immediately thought back to Reddit bots - most notably, the “autotldr” bot that created condensed summaries of articles linked in subreddits. Thus, the first pinned comment of every political article would have two parts to it: a summary and a fact check, courtesy of Politifact.

While there are bots similar to Reddit bots across a variety of mediums as well as fact-checking sites such as Politifact and Snopes, there seem to be a lack of applications and websites that are easily accessible and user-friendly. I believe that combining the two - into Facebot - would create more impact for users.

During the course of this project, a few new Facebook features were implemented: the most notable allowed users to report “false news” on Facebook.

I thus decided to incorporate this element into my prototype. However, one flaw this function holds is that users can report any article they want, regardless of actual bias. As expected, it led many partisan groups to report news they disagreed with regardless of credibility.

After presenting the redesigned prototype to several interviewees, I received the following feedback.

For people like me, I prefer reading summaries to articles. I think I’ll be more informed about the world with summaries because I rarely take the time to read a whole article.

I think it’d be great if the news page pinned a summary in their comments, but then their actual page won’t really get readers.

I think it will create a trend towards a more unbiased reporting: if there is pressure to, there will be a response.

Final Prototype

Rather than put the “report as false news” option on every article where anybody and anyone could access it, I decided to place the option in the pinned comment so users would be able to read both the summary and fact check before proceeding.

By doing this, I wanted to stem some of the mindless flagging and create a basis for Facebook to determine whether the flagging claims are credible or not.

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reflection + thoughts

Though this project, I was able to gain a deep understanding of the human-centered design process. It reinforced my belief in the importance of multiple user interviews - only through them have I been able to catch habits and trends I might not have otherwise.

If I had more time, I would have liked to address how this feature would have affected journalism, given that my solution is dependent on summaries. I would have also liked to explore other mediums, and how Facebot would be integrated on those platforms.