Timeline
3 weeks
Role / Responsibilities
Research (collaborated with team in writing questions, transcribing interviews, synthesizing insights), Writing (collaborated with team to write paper), Design (Designed all features and mockups)
Team of 3
Tools
Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, Voice Memo App
Goals
How can we affect behavior in the comments section and promote a culture of critical thinking and informedness on Facebook? How can we design features that target specific issues raised by users?
01. Project Scope
This was a final project for my Social Informatics course in Spring 2017 where we used empathy-driven design thinking to solve a problem within a digital tool or technology, pulling from areas of Sara Wachter-Boettcher's Design for Real Life for inspiration. Given the whirlwind surrounding Facebook, fake news and distrust in media during the time of this course, my team and I thought this would be a great topic to explore.
As part of the project, we conducted various types of user research: surveys, interviews and think-aloud group discussions as a catalyst for our design-based solutions. At the conclusion of the course, we presented research + design and wrote a paper.
02. Background
FB Mission Statement: “make the world more open & Connected"
In some ways, comment sections across the Internet serve at the core of our democracy: an open, collaborative environment where you can share personal opinions, engage in healthy debate and spark meaningful dialogue between strangers and friends alike over the content you consume. Over the years, the comments section on Facebook particularly has received a negative reputation for hateful speech and misinformed dialogue.
Content on Facebook exists in all different forms - the content regularly curated on the platform for users to consume (videos, photos, articles, posts and ads) are equally as valuable as the ways in which they engage beyond, through whichever form that it takes. Facebook is focused on making the world “more open and connected” - how can the experience using and engaging with the comments section be improved to meet this mission?
Defining the optimal user flow vs. what we typically see users in our research doing - to understand where it goes off course, we examined what motivations were driving this deviation from normative behavior and how we could re-navigate them back to the "optimal flow".
03. Research-based Solutions
After compiling our findings + interviews and mapping user flows, we look at how patterns in user behaviors and attitudes could be articulated through design or user flow changes within the Facebook mobile app - without radically changing the landscape. Below are three potential solutions we presented that could tackle the problems we came across.
Above is a metric system that shows the average reading time for each news article (borrowing from Medium) and within the comments, an indicator of how much time a user spent on an article and a percentage indicator of “engagement”.
Here two things are happening: content is verified - not the user and average reading time is included before the article is even opened. Verification symbols appear next to comments posted and trace through the user’s past engagement and commenting history as well as past flagged/reported incidents to present a label.
There are a few ways to approach this: disabling comments until the user has either read the full article, reached halfway in reading time or at the midpoint of a piece of content.
A few Updates and learnings
There are many ways each of these challenges could be addressed and given a longer timeline, we would have loved to do more diverse types of research, longer studies and iterated on our design solutions with new user feedback in Week 4 and beyond. These solutions won't prevent false information spreading on Facebook or being internalized - but it may prompt users to think about their own user behaviors when engaging with content, the priority they place on certain comments and what they deem to be credible. Ultimately, this was an exercise in conducting research, extracting insights and brainstorming new ways to enhance a digital experience for a user group.
A few months after our project, Facebook actually rolled out a new feature to place ads mid-way through videos and later, disabling the commenting feature during while the ad was playing - they also redesigned the comments section to look eerily close to messenger chat boxes, a reminder that the comments is not just a place to drop off your world views, but thoroughly engage and converse with others as the battle ground for democracy it is.
