Frontpage via Facebook

fact checking social media newS

THE PROBLEM

The intersection of news and social media has become a high profile topic in the past few years. Facebook has become a focal point in spreading inaccurate news content, undermining user confidence.

As a conceptual project, my team and I researched how users felt about news received through their Facebook feed, and then designed and prototyped a better experience as a stand-alone app.  

Here's how it works: 

My ROLE:  Research & Design

DURATION: 2 Weeks

TOOLS UseD:    Sketch   |   Flinto    |  Omnigraffle   |   Jira

SCOPE

During the course of this 2–week project I:

• conducted user research via

  • in-person interviews

  • online surveys

• conducted analysis & synthesis of research data via

  • affinity mapping

  • persona creation

  • user journeys

• conducted supplemental research via

  • feature analysis

  • competitive matrix

• designed wireframes & clickable prototypes in both

  • mid-fidelity and

  • hi-fidelity

• and finally, conducted multiple rounds of usability testing and iteration in order to reach the result.

Discovery: Research and Synthesis

The initial assumption was that Facebook users had grown skeptical of the stories that they were receiving in their feeds. In order to confirm if this was the case, we conducted a series of 15 interviews to see how users felt about the stories they received through the site. 

After synthesizing the information received from the interviews via affinity mapping, we came out with the following key insights: 

• Users were highly skeptical of news received through social media, but still felt there was value in sharing articles within their networks.

• Therefore, they need additional tools to evaluate whether or not the news they were receive is trustworthy.

Personas

Based on this feedback, we developed 2 personas to help guide our design process.  

First was Katheryn — a young, tech-savvy, social media user who has gotten burned a few times by inaccurate articles.  As a result, she is increasingly distrustful of articles on social media.

Second was Cameron, a highly informed and engaged news reader who is also very involved in social media.  He has given up entirely on reading news through Facebook, and would need some kind of game-changing product to bring him back.

IDEATION

After considering user needs and pain points, we began to think through features to include in our product. 

We imagined an aggregated news feed app that leveraged APIS through organizations such as Politifact, Reuters & Google News, to provide fact-checking and political bias analysis.

The app would also incorporate a social media news feed generated via the user’s Facebook profile applying the same analytics.

We also included user feedback ratings about the usefulness of each article, and a way to access contextual information so users could learn more about the subject. 

PLATFORM

Considering the various platforms to use, we opted to design the product as a native iOS app. Our research showed that over 93% of Facebook’s monthly active users accessed via mobile platforms and 56% accessed only via mobile platforms, so we thought this would be the best direction to design into. 

Design

Once we decided on a basic concept and platform, we went through several rounds of design studio to arrive at some ideas for the look and feel.

Our priority was to keep it clean, simple and focused on content, with indicators about which media channel the content was coming from and what measures were being taken to evaluate its reliability and usefulness. 

USABILITY TESTING ROund 1

We first built mid-fidelity wireframes and used Flinto to create a clickable prototype for initial usability testing.  Usability tests were conducted with 5 separate participants in order to get a sense of how the flow and layout of the site was working.

The tests were very successful overall, however users indicated that they would like to see additional functions incorporated into the app, including sorting, sharing, and more information on how the articles were evaluated in terms of bias and truthfulness.

Having gathered these insights from the mid-fi prototypes, we then moved into designing prototypes in hi-fidelity, incorporating some of the features users had requested in the mid-fi version. 

USABILITY TESTING round 2

We then went into a second round of usability testing in Hi-Fidelity with these new features added. Interestingly, while still strong overall, our user success rates fell slightly during the second testing round, which we attribute primarily to increased complexity that the added features offered. Despite this overall feedback was positive, and users indicated that this was a product that they didn’t see on the market currently and would be willing to use if it existed. 

conclusions

In terms of next steps, I would want to provide additional instruction during the on-boarding process to orient users as to the features available, as well as to inform how the bias indicators and usefulness ratings were determined. 

However, as a conceptual project, I felt that we succeeded in identifying a legitimate area of need, fueling a large amount of user feedback which were were able to leverage into a design that seems useful and relevant. 

In fact, a little over a month after the conclusion of this project, Facebook itself announced that it had plans to introduce a "trustworthiness score" to news articles shared through its site, validating our initial concept.