FrontPage: An Anti-Fake News App (Conceptual)
My role
Researcher, designer, prototype builder, and tester.
Timeframe
Two weeks in a three-person team with GA UXDI classmates, Julia Purcell and Jonathan Garcia researching, ideating, prototyping, and testing.
Limitations, Parameters, Resources, and Materials
The parameter of the project was time and having just begun learning about Flinto, our chosen prototyping tool. Our team conducted research and synthesis in a timely manner; this enabled us to spend the remainder of our time building and testing the mid-fidelity prototype and high-fidelity prototype. Since the app contained relatively new concepts, with increased fidelity and functions with the high-fidelity prototype, we realized a couple more days were needed to incorporate feedback from the first round of testing of the high-fidelity screens and completing another round of usability tests.
The Challenge
Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg; And while Facebook has primarily defined itself as social media — a way for friends and family to connect with one another, as of 2017, ⅔ of adults get their news from social media (Pew Research Center). The company now has 2.07 billion monthly active users (Facebook Q3 2017 Investor Report) who frequently read news articles from their newsfeeds. With the understanding that Facebook has a significant influence on news consumption of its users (and has done so in the 2016 election with ads / “fake news”, to the dismay of many people), the brand’s credibility has been undermined significantly. Our group set our eyes on addressing suspicion of news on Facebook while also creating increasing transparency and context.
Our Problem Statement
Users of social media are skeptical that the news they’re reading on their feeds is legitimate and based on facts.
How might we help readers of the news on Facebook have confidence in the legitimacy and transparency of the news they’re consuming?
The Opportunity
This is where FrontPage comes in- FrontPage is a news aggregator that leverages API’s for fact checking for articles and political biases for news sources; the app integrates with Facebook’s social media newsfeed. We believe that these features would provide real value to users — that they would feel they are getting something that they can’t get elsewhere. We know there are other apps that aggregate news from different sources, but they don’t provide any way to evaluate the soundness of the content as FrontPage would. When you add the ability to tap into your Facebook newsfeed and apply the same evaluation standards to the content available through those channels, we think that this could prove to be a unique product that provides real value to the user.
In terms of platform, we opted to go with an iOS native app. Our background research showed that 93% of Facebook’s daily active users are on mobile, and in user interviews we identified some users who only interacted with Facebook and news sites via their mobile apps, so we thought this would be best direction to build into. Once iOS the app is up and running, we would expect to expand to other platforms such as responsive web, android, and tablet.
The Research: User Research and Feature Analysis
My assumptions were validated through a series of user research, competitive, and feature analysis.
Those assumptions were that users who read the news on Facebook:
- Want to know if statements are true
- Want transparency in bias and opinions
- Assume articles are mostly clickbait
- Check reputable sources to compare information reported in articles on Facebook
- Want the material to be more approachable
- Have follow-up questions to articles and will search on Google for answers
Our goal for the User Interviews was understand how best to facilitate news consumption on Facebook.
We interviewed ten users.
Here is a sample of the questions we posed to participants:
- How many times did you read the news last week?
- What questions, if any, about the article / content / author do you have when you read an article?
- Tell me about the last news article that you remember reading on social media. What social media site? What was the news source?
- What is your perception of articles on your feed?
- When you read news on social media websites, what if anything do you appreciate about the experience?
- What, if anything, makes the news you read seem credible? What, if anything, makes the news seem unreliable?
Some key insights from user interviews were that users:
- Want news from legitimate news sources
- Have go-to trusted sources (ie. The New York Times and The Washington Post)
- Want to be able to research articles
- Want available alternative viewpoints on a topic covered
- Want transparency in how much an article is opinion and fact
- Want to be on top of current events / in the know of what everyone finds important
- Discount articles on Facebook due to perceived lack of credibility and transparency
We developed our personas based on the rich qualitative data from the user interviews:
Focusing on Katheryn, we also documented her experience reading the news on Facebook
Feature Analysis of competitive sites / apps at the intersection of social media and news was compiled to better understand the features that might be expected:
With so many features we would consider, we used MoSCoW method to prioritize what would actually make its way into the MVP:
Sketches / Ideation
To address this mountain of features, we proposed leveraging API’s from a number of sources:
APIs we’ll utilize on the FrontPage MVP
- Wikipedia API: Provide definitions and general information on topics in articles.
- Google News APIs (for specific news sources): Pull headlines from chosen sources to allow users to dig deeper on a topic from respected sources.
- Reuters API: Another respected news source for users to dig deeper. For iterations after the MVP, use this for breaking news notifications should there be a demand.
- PolitiFact API Statements: Statements are pieces of text PolitiFact has checked these would become annotations in an article and drive the fact-o-meter for each article.
Mid-Fidelity Prototype
Testing the Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
Iteration / High-Fidelity Prototype
Testing the High-Fidelity Prototype
To note, there was a slight decrease in successful task completion rate from 100% to ~86.66% when we moved to high-fidelity; we thought the decreased performance was due to increased complexity from added features (i.e. scrolling on the onboarding screens and introduction of filters in the news feeds).
Next Steps
Key Feature changes to consider in the next iteration:
- Share button on social feed
- Done Button: appearing after selecting one news source / topic when onboarding
- Tool Tips: Add a screen to onboarding where the user is directed to new / FrontPage-specific concepts such as bias indicators and the “useful” rating
- Highlights: clarifying the information found in the highlights (user-generated notes, fact-checked notes pulled from Politifact, and for / against articles for contextual research)
Prototype
Final Thoughts
The drive behind this project exceeded anything I’ve experienced with my UX projects thus far. This project is known as the “Passion Project” which I understood soon after starting it. It was a constant adrenaline rush trying to understand how to meet the users’ needs in an effective, learnable, and memorable design. The team was rallied behind the cause and worked incredible hours with enthusiasm, which was one of the highlights of working on FrontPage. The MUJI project was the first project thus far I felt compelled to follow-through with if I had a foot in the door to approach a decision-maker at MUJI. This just slid into the top of my priority list without a doubt.
