Understanding how people explore death penalty information, and how to give them a reason to explore

Introduction

In our last post we left off with some questions we wanted to explore based on our first round of concept testing results. Since then, we have been building mini prototypes to find answers to those questions.

Our first question is about learning what drives people to learn more. In order to understand this, we built and tested a prototype that assesses how deep or broad people want to go into death penalty information.

From that study, we found that many people felt like they need a reason to explore death penalty information. As a result, we built a prototype focused on addressing how we can convince people to buy into a reason to learn more.

Question 1: What drives people to learn more?

The first prototype we built was aimed at understanding how people explore death penalty information. DPIC’s information is both thorough and vast, and we wondered:

Do people explore the information in depth or first go through several topics superficially by breadth?

We wanted to explore how both thorough and vast information can be presented to keep people on a site for longer. We explored this question by creating both a paper and Figma prototype that allows people to explore five different death penalty topics that have a lot of layers of information within them.

Findings from this study informed us on how the future website IA and content modeling should be structured to draw people in and stay interested while they’re on the DPIC site.

Paper prototypes of different topics about the Death Penalty “linked” together by a tab system.

Our Figma prototype emulated the paper version by presenting 5 topics related to the death penalty at a high level. Testers could either dig deep into each one or explore a range of topics.

Findings & Key Takeaways

The topic most deeply explored was ‘Numbers behind the Death Penalty’ while the least deeply explored topic was ‘Innocence’. ‘Breaking News’ and ‘Numbers behind the Death Penalty’ were explored first the most.

Capacity to consume content

1. Participants engage with content for under 10 minutes, indicating a need for content that maintains interest, is revisitable, and/or impactful in a short time.
2. Participants can handle only a few new topics and limited depth per session, suggesting we avoid overwhelming them with too much content.
3. Participants vary in preferring breadth or depth, necessitating adaptable content for both exploration types.

Need for a motivated reason to engage

1. Familiar topics (e.g., “Breaking news”) attracted participants, while unfamiliar ones (e.g., “Innocence”) didn’t, highlighting the importance of familiarity in engagement.
2. Personally connected information piques interest and curiosity, so our solution should emphasize these connections and offer personalized material.
3. Many need a compelling reason to use a site, so we must provide a strong incentive for learning.

Finding Compelling Designs Through “Weird” Ideas

We realized throughout our prototype testing that people who had strong motivations or personal reasons to learn were likely to engage with the content for longer and in more meaningful ways. We therefore wanted to go back to ideating new concepts, this time focusing on engaging users to stay learning. With the help of Professor Jessica Hammer, we did 4 iterations of a “weird ideas” activity that helped us arrive at new concepts to address this. The process we took to generate ideas through this activity is as follows:

1. As a group, identify a persuasive design method to engage people
2. Everyone individually ideates ways to address this goal, thinking of “weird” or unconventional ways to achieve it
3. Discuss these ideas as a group, and identify the essence of them (why they are provocative and important)
4. Use that essence as a grounding point to ideate more realistic approaches

The persuasive design techniques we used were cognitive dissonance, self-affirmation, priming, and goal-setting. Through these we came up with a wide array of new concepts that we found to be a lot more intentional, impactful, and engaging.

Some of our “weird” ideas generated from this activity

At the end of this activity, we were able to identify a promising set of concepts that could be combined into different engagement experiences. These were all focusing not necessarily on how to present death penalty information itself, but more so on how to appeal to people’s personal goals, emotions, and interests so that they are more compelled to engage with the topic to begin with.

The process of transforming our “weird” ideas into realistic concepts

Question 2: How do we give people a reason to want to learn more on the DPIC site? — Laura

This sprint’s prototype testing built on a key takeaway from that previous study: people said they wouldn’t just go onto and stay on the DPIC site naturally. They needed a reason to go and stay on the site, and that’s why looking through information that’s both varied in both depth and breadth doesn’t actually match their natural behavior. The big question we wanted to focus on with this sprint’s testing is therefore:

How do we give people a reason to want to learn more on the DPIC site?

Through our weird idea activity, we came up with four different experiences we took participants through to see how effective they are in getting them more interested in learning more:

1. Personal connection — an experience that connects to people’s personal lives and experiences
2. Goal setting — making people set a goal of what they want to learn, encouraging them to continue learning to achieve that goal
3. Social pressure — somewhat guilt-tripping people into wanting to participate or learn more
4. Social responsibility — outlining the disparity between users’ values and the reality of the practice of the death penalty.

Testing and evaluation

Our testing and evaluation plan looked to answer the following questions:

• How effective is each experience in getting people to learn more?
• How interested are people in the experiences in the first place?

We answered these questions through doing these following things:

• Setting participants up with a scenario about finding death penalty information and asked to behave as they would naturally, when clicking through with the prototype.
• Asking participants about the types of content they are drawn to on the various pages, whether they would engage or not, and how the different experiences made them feel.
• Having participants rank the experiences from least compelling to most compelling in terms of being invested and wanting to learn more about the death penalty.

Next Steps

In the next couple weeks we plan to analyze the data from our most recent rounds of concept testing. We will use that analysis to help us solidify an ideal user journey on the website for new learners to convince them to learn and care more. We will be pinpointing where in the journey new learners need to be convinced to dive deeper and focus our final prototype on intervening in those moments. Using this journey, we will finalize our final prototype direction.