Progress Update: Another Shift
The week of February 18 was a challenging one, as I wrote previously. After narrowing my framework focus a bit to designing with restorative circle principles on Facebook, and getting ready to present it as my proof of concept, another interesting but diverging concept came out of my thesis advisor meeting. My advisor, Dalit, suggested that I could design a plugin that annotates and surfaces Facebook’s community guidelines. This would be an iteration of using the restorative circle principle of Agreements to address how on Facebook the community guidelines are not accessible from the user home page. It’s unclear where they actually live on the site, and how users would find them without searching for them. This means that Facebook exists without any clearly communicated standards or expectations of user behavior — it’s no wonder so many have abused the platform or used it to cause harm.
I liked this idea a lot, because it had the concrete quality I’d been searching for. I could also use it to demonstrate and test the ideas I had already developed for my framework, which meant that I wouldn’t have to abandon all of my work to date (which I was panicking about earlier in the week). I decided to shift in this direction, and begin creating a prototype to present for our proof of concept milestone.
I started my doing some research to try to understand the technology of plugins and browser extensions. I’m still not totally certain how they differ, but after experimenting with some Chrome browser extensions for Facebook, I decided it would work best as an extension, which would also leave room for it to become a browser extension that works on multiple platforms or websites, not just Facebook. I did some quick sketches to help visualize the interaction with the extension:
I also revisited my roadmap, and iterated on it for the extension direction. I focused on three user goals I had identified from my discovery phase research, and labeled them each with a category from my previous framework. I then identified a feature to address that goal.
I sketched this out with post-its to help organize my thinking.
User Goal 1: I want to have a clear understanding of use and behavior guidelines on the platform
Category: Community guidelines
Feature: Prominently placed button/box on home page to take you to community guidelines; annotation of community guidelines
User Goal 2: I want to be able to express my tone of voice, feelings and sentiment my words and to understand them from others
Category: Interactions with other users
Feature: Comment review before posting; when you reply to a post, brings up abbreviated profile of the author of the comment or the reply
User Goal 3: I want to know what Facebook is doing with my data, who can see it, and who can contact me.
Category: Data and privacy
Feature: Pop-ups when you add data to your profile about what Facebook might do with it, and where you can adjust your settings; Prominently placed button/box on home page to take you to privacy settings
When I sat down to start building these features for my proof of concept, I quickly realized I needed to be more strategic with the time I had available and more specific about the problem I was trying to solve. My husband reminded me that everything I built needed to be in service of this problem, and if it wasn’t, I should table it. I decided to focus on the problem that has been the most compelling to me, and that initiated my exploration of restorative justice as an antidote: the problem of incivility on Facebook, which I believe comes from the absence of the communication cues we rely on in person, such as tone of voice, body language and facial expressions.
This meant that I needed to table (at least temporarily) two of the user goal categories I had identified earlier: community guidelines and data & privacy. From here, I developed features identified for User Goal 2, and began expanding on one in particular: the abbreviated profile view. The way comments appear now, the text takes priority, and the avatar is so small that it’s easy to forget there’s actually another human being who wrote it. This lead me to start thinking about an alternative view of discussions that happen within post comments, which would resemble a dinner table discussion. I started sketching before moving over to Sketch:
