My role
Our team consisted of 3 industrial design students. The project scope includes user research, user testing, experience design, visual design, and prototyping. I led the process of visual design directions, mock ups, and prototypes.
Goals
To motivate students to develop their own informed decisions, and learn from different news sources from across their political spectrum
Duration: 5 Weeks
Issues
Party polarization is at an all time high. In a recent survey between democrats and republicans, over half of participants felt
“very unfavorably” of the opposing party (Pew Research Center, 2016). From 1994 to 2014, various statistics show that overlap between ideologies have shifted away from each other, to opposite ends of the political spectrum. Bias in the media is both a cause and effect of this polarization, and presents itself in news article headlines such as these:
Key Insights
After initial research, we learned that students are just beginning to get involved in politics; since 73% of teenagers aged 13-17 have access to smart phones, they are exposed to a wide range of news sources on social media - such as Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. In addition, we gathered a survey of 38 students from grade 7-12 to learn how they currently identify bias in the news.
Here is what we’ve learned from our potential users:
44% used social media’s direct links to consume news. Majority of them understand bias but it’s difficult for them to identify accurate information from various sources that they can access.
Some students are skeptical of the news and are not able to identify accurate information from news sources. They tend to read news sources they agree with without considering biases and fallacies from sources they trust
Social media, friends, and families tend to influence their judgement on news consumption
Needs
They would like to have access to resources that inform them on different perspectives
To educate on how to identify factual information from news sources
Problem Statement
“How might we inform middle & high school students about biases and fallacies in the news and provide them with the tools to identify accurate information and develop informed opinions?”
User flows
We created a user flow to understand key principles to learn how to identify accurate information from news sources. From these sessions, we were able to came up with three main categories of educational modules:
Distinguishing fact from opinion
Understanding personal bias
Identifying facts by comparing two side-by-side articles on the same topic.
Because they have different access to new sources from across the political spectrum. Site mapping helped us organized the content and achieved our design goals.
Our Solution
What is bias?
We included this section as the most basic level of understanding. For younger students, it provides an easy way to consume an overview of the importance of understanding the difference between facts and opinions.
Flashcards populate with real excerpts from news articles. The user will be able to select which cards are facts from a collection of written opinions- syntactically designed to appear like facts.
Understanding your bias.
The user will be able to take a quiz to figure out where their personal bias may lie. Understanding your own biases will help you make thoughtful decisions and create opinions founded on factual evidence. A series of basic questions will provide a rough overview of which side of the political spectrum they may lean.
The user completes set of questions covering polarizing issues in America, aimed at identifying personal bias.
Identify bias
The user will be given two real articles from opposite sides of the political spectrum and be asked to identify the bias in each section. From there, they will be able to create their own summary of what they learned from both articles in a simple sentence.
The extension
The just. extension is a helpful tool to keep open as you are reading daily news. It points out the reputation (i.e., Mainly Liberal, Slightly Conservative, Extremely Conservative, etc.) of the specific source you are currently reading, and also populates with articles from sources with different points of view.
just. will highlight the main idea of the article, and will also call out areas where the article could be more precise. In this example, the article cites that the pipeline runs over 2,000 miles. just. points out that another article offers a more precise version of this fact. The extension will also highlight areas in the article that have been cited by other verified sources.
Next Steps
Although it is an initial concept, we realized that it probably involve with a lot of engineering effort in order to make this project possible. We didn’t have an opportunity to consult with engineers given our project timeline. That way, we could prioritize and scope our project more in detail.
Continue testing the prototypes with students and gather quantifiable feedback for further iterations
Explore ways to scale this project and implementation possibilities