Part 3 — The NewsTector | Final Prototype and Documentation

Introduction

After conducting both primary and secondary research, a list of observations and findings have been developed to start the design process of the prototype. The following content documents the key features and functions of the design with video clips to explain the concepts of the design solution.

We pinpointed the problem:

How might we persuade people to not consume the news blindly and instead develop critical evaluation of facts in a manner that it is easily accessible by everyone.

Here is a quick overview into the problem and solution:

Research Findings and Features

Both two types of research methods aim to gain a thorough idea of people’s attitudes and behaviors toward the fake news topic. The primary research includes a series of in-person interviews, online surveys, and behavioral experiments on approximately 25 participants who have diverse backgrounds. Based on the feedback, some of the key findings are founded through these activities:

1. Those who identify the news correctly demonstrated stronger critical evaluation behaviors and greater use of verification strategies, and these skills are related to their educational background, and how often they read the news.

2. Most people are less serious and care about the truthfulness of news they see on the internet; some only believe the news from a trustworthy and reliable platform that they carefully chose;

3. People are less likely to spend time finding out the truthfulness of the news unless they are interested in the topic.

4. Some people judge the news based on their bias / subjective analysis, and they are more likely to believe news stories they want to be true.

The research clearly provides a sufficient amount of ideas for designing a quick-use tool for the audience to efficiently distinguish the authenticity of the sources with clear direction. Therefore, in order to begin designing the final prototypes, some of the tool features have been included to list out the basic structures of the tool.

We decided to take the approach of encouraging people to think critically and consume News as responsible citizens of the world. Hence the approach taken was to build an algorithm that generates counter questions rather than facts and thus forces the reader to question their own biases.

User Flow and Wireframes

After developing some of the features of the tool, the concept of building a browser-based application becomes the main direction of designing the prototype. As many current news media platforms tend to be online, the audience actually spends a large amount of time reading and sharing news through the online media platform. It becomes essential to design an application that minimizes bias and prevents services that are largely in the hands of a single application owned monopolies. In addition, it should be easy and clear to navigate and use while the audience is processing a diverse amount of information sources at once. Therefore, creating the user flow permits us to read through the sequence of the tool in a clearer way and introduces the key concepts and functions of the prototype. Moreover, the following wireframes illustrate the user interfaces of the applications with detailed examples of how users can interact with the product.

Final Prototypes

Both the user flow and wireframes certainly provide a more distinct direction of designing the prototypes. Continuing with the design process, the following content records down both the features and functions of the design solution.

Thoughts and Reflection

After completing the current version of the application, we noticed there are still some challenged remainings and other observations that could be beneficial for future iterations. The entire research and design process occurs approximately 3 weeks long with an intense schedule to conduct both research and design practices. In this case, a longer duration of primary research could be implemented including gaining more participants on the interview and survey, conducting direct observations on people’s reactions to reading fake news and receiving a more diverse range of feedback. Speaking of the future direction of the project, a usability test on the product should be performed in order to gain a more thorough insight into how users may actually interact with the prototype. In order to finalize the project, several tasks could be included in the next step:

1. Building up multiple versions of the application such as iOs and Android so it performed consistently across different platforms
2. Arrange a diverse background of participants to use the prototype and actively collect feedback and thoughts during the usability testing
3. Keep exploring the new opportunities in the current technology and discussing the principles of combating fake news

Overall, the project provides a great opportunity to start thinking deeply about creating a user-friendly design in a variety of situations. The process of the research and design certainly represent the key concepts of ideation and prototyping.