Curating conversation through news
According to Pew Research Center’s report, 62% of adults in the U.S. gets news from social media. However, as content on social platforms becomes increasingly curated to personal preferences, individual’s exposure to diverse media fades. Curation creates filter bubbles, which reinforce people’s existing beliefs by filtering out diverse perspectives. This leads to the following question:
How might we give people agency over news content to enable them to “burst” filter bubbles and broaden perspectives through interaction?
As we began our project, we defined three goals:
1. Help people reduce cognitive load in finding new perspectives
2. Emphasize and reflect on experiences about news topics
3. Share opinions and meet diverse individuals in real-time
After the breakout of the pandemic, Carnegie Mellon University has made the announcement that all classes were going to be held online indefinitely until later notices. All the team members were scattered in different time zones and we moved to online collaboration ever since. We used video conferencing, online collaboration tools to host meetings and conduct remote design research. Our team managed to yield high-quality results despite dealing with all the uncertainties induced by COVID-19.
We designed a mobile application, NewsFeel, to help people learn about their news consumption and provide access to anonymous, small group discussion. NewsFeel contains two major components:
1. Curated News Topics: Users have access to the curated trending news topics on local, national, and international levels.
2. Chatroom: Users are uniquely matched into a small, anonymous, group chat to discuss the topics they just read and share their personal experiences.
The app aims to cover diverse opinions within each recommended topic and match users with different views to a chatroom. We would track user's behavior data to adjust algorithm accordingly. Ultimately, we want to nudge people to be more empathetic towards others and think critically when reading news.
Mobile-first Design:
User's news-reading device usage informed our decision to start from designing mobile app. This allowed us to be more content focused and prioritize elements base on visual hierarchy.
Desktop compatibility:
The desktop app allows users to be flexible when switching between devices. Presenting more organized information at once reduces the number of screen changes.
UX Flow:
For more detailed final app features, please refer to Product.
Literature Review
We have used literature review as the first step to understand what is filter bubble and its negative effects. By studying how to counter the filter bubble, I found assisting individuals to have more control over their filter bubbles can lead to increasing empathy for others, reducing personal biases, and enabling authentic online dialog. More details are shown below:
Competitive Analysis
Our team analyzed 14 products in the market, which are related to improving news consumption habits including chrome plug-ins, , responsive web and apps. From the competitive analysis, I have synthesized four essential features to be included in the ideation process.
Setting four main goals for the app design:
1. Reverse the effect of filter bubble
2. Promote critical thinking when reading news
3. Present a comprehensive view of news topics
4. Provide access to build interpersonal connections of diverse view
Identifying the personality difference across users after the synthesis of testing results
Our user is defined as people who are motivated to learn about different perspectives. By conducting speed dating research, I identified different user needs based on their degrees of extraversion. In order to encourage for all levels of engagement, I proposed three features for the solution as shown in the diagram.
Wireframing
Based on the ideation, we derived three alternative wireframes for curated news topics and one set for the chatroom.
Low Fidelity Prototype
Based on the user feedback, we developed a set of low-fi prototypes. I was in charge of the chat room low-fi development. After the development of low fi, I designed a remote user research to understand the needed interactions and features in the chatroom within the context.
Proposed Chatroom Feature
1. Chatbot facilitation - facilitates ice breaker
2. Prompt generation - generates possible, appropriate prompts base on the context
3. News articles - easy back to the previous read news
4. Member profile - accessible member profile and their reasons for joining the chat
To further probe what were the needed features of the chatroom, I constructed a remote design study and used empathy map for data synthesis.
Evaluating Chatroom Features
# of participants: 10
# of sessions: 2
Tool involved: Zoom, Chatzy, Slack
Process:
1. Assigned news articles to each participant beforehand and asked them to send back what they were interested in the article as the conversation starter
2. Invited participants to the chatroom and introduced the chatbot (one of the researcher wizard of oz).
3.Chatbot observed the interaction and intervened when conversation ceased for 45s.
Applying research insights
By using empathy map to analyze user's experience, we have derived three main insights:
1. The desire for constructive conversation leads naturally to the acknowledgment of others’ opinions.
2. The first person who shares a personal story demonstrates vulnerability through taking a risk and by doing so opens the floor for others in the chat to share more freely. This person can also be identified as a chat experience leader who facilitates a safe space for others.
3. Conversing with others helps people challenge and formulate their own ideas and perspectives.
Mid Fidelity Prototype
I redesigned low-fi prototype into mid-fi by incorporating user feedback. To allow for more inclusiveness, I also designed a desktop version for people who prefer reading news on their laptop with a bigger screen.
Designing the High Fidelity Prototype
Next Step...
