Biased information leads to rash and ill-informed decisions that can be financially, emotionally, and mentally costly. People see the content close to what they have interacted with previously due to social media algorithms that constantly offer a source of information to users, thus reinforcing a bias.
Our design solution’s human problem is the political bias reinforced through the social media platform Facebook. By introducing our solution, “Flip/Side,” we believe that users will be motivated to understand both sides of the issue, therefore mitigating bias.
Final Project MS HCI 1st Semester
Competitor Analysis
Storyboarding
Prototyping
Cognitive Walkthrough
Usability Testing
My Role - UX Researcher, Product Designer
Duration - 6 Weeks
Team - Cooper Wojick, Jessica Bentley, Ying-Hsuan Kuo
With 2.4 billion users, Facebook is the most popular social media platform today. More than 31% of the entire world population and over 67% of the USA’s total population is on this platform. Facebook’s algorithms give political campaigners the ability to target messages to people who are already inclined to believe them, allowing them to take advantage of confirmation bias. This so-called “filter bubble” effect isolates people from a variety of viewpoints, reinforcing confirmation bias.
As a Product Designer, I was in charge of the entire product creation process. I collaborated with the team to discover and define a problem and then empathically designing a solution.
As a User Experience Researcher, I conducted primary research, secondary research, usability testing, and analysis to uncover problems and design opportunities.
We spoke with six people in four age groups: 18-24, 25-40, 40-55, and 55 and up. We inquired about the origins of their knowledge, their perception of misinformation, and how to identify it. Interviews with journalists and fact-checking educators taught us about academic approaches and technologies. Meanwhile, we conducted a competitor analysis to determine what has been done and what needs to be done.
The main problems that emerged through our research include:
How might we design a solution to address the political information bias created through social media platforms?
The problem space’s emphasis is on the one-sided knowledge that college students gain from social media sites. While the issue affects more than just college students, we decided to concentrate on this age group due to accessibility and social media proficiency.
We brought 40+ ideas, and used affinity mapping to organize them, and came up with four main concepts:
1) Workshops
2) Integration with existing technologies
3) Discussion Forums
4) Gamification
We brainstormed and assessed the viability of each concept. We realized people need good encouragement to participate in a conversation or workshop in learning the other side of the story. On the other hand, playing a game is a fun way to provide people with information.
The idea of “Integration with current technology” prompted us to create a gamification interface under Facebook Games rather than getting people onboarded on a new platform. Therefore, we decided to combine “Gamification” and “Existing Technologies” as our design concept.
After elaborating on the two ideas above, we decided to design a trivia game hosted on Facebook Messenger. The game uses the user’s social media data to understand their political opinion and match them accordingly with friends or strangers who have the opposite view. The user then has to play the game by proving the opponent’s point of view as correct and learning in the process. Playing the game increases the users ranking in the system. The higher the ranking, the more informed the user becomes on both sides of the particular issue.
We started working on concepts for the Flip/Side application after defining the problem and doing research. Below is the final paper prototype.
We conducted Cognitive Walkthrough to test the functions of our paper prototype and addressed three recommendations to improve the design:
Problem: Users had low confidence in the system as they believed that their data is being misused.
Solution: Add a visual notification before the system access the user’s newsfeed.
Problem: Users had difficulty understanding the purpose of the button “Tell us more.”
Solution: Paraphrasing, the button as “Questionnaire”, will make the purpose of this button clearer.
Problem: Users did not understand what “others” meant.
Solution: Use “random users” instead of “others” to help the user understand who they will pair.
Based on the iterative design evaluation process conducted on low fidelity prototypes, we reached the following state of high fidelity prototype.
Flip/Side is a Facebook in-app game that allows users to access the application through Facebook Gaming and invite their friends to join them directly through Facebook.
Flip/Side matches users and provides personalized questions according to their biases. It has two ways to analyze:
Facebook newsfeed Analysis: Once a user allows Flip/Side to access their Facebook newsfeed, the application analyzes biases with texts and links on the newsfeed.
User Survey: If the user refuses Flip/Side to access their newsfeed, they can still take a user survey to measure bias.
Flip/Side recommends users with different biases. The application would then rewards users extra points when they choose to play a game with contrasting opinions.
The design reflection was an iterative process on the high-fidelity prototype. We conducted the
usability tests in four sessions on the primary tasks of the application. We asked the users to think-aloud while performing these four tasks, and we noted down the users’ challenges.
The Bias System: The users and experts worried about how this could negatively impact the user because of misplacement or creating a biased system.
Action: Research and more testing would need to be done in this area for the users to be comfortable with the outcome.
Transparency: The evaluators felt they did not completely understand why they were in a particular category. They did not know what data was used from their feed.
Action: We would need to clarify these sections and disclose the system operation of gathering and analyzing user data from the individual newsfeed.
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