Fact-checking app

The problem in short
Fake news is putting global democracies in crisis. According to “Measuring the news and its impact on democracy”, by Duncan J. Watts, David M. Rothschild, and Markus Mobius, this happens despite less than 1% of regular news consumption and less than 1/10th of 1% of overall media consumption could be considered fake. Even the heaviest consumers of fake news (the 55+ age group) consume less than 1 min of fake news per day on average, compared with 106 min of regular news (94 of them on TV) and over 500 min of total media consumption. 

Fake news conditions democratic elections. Too often, they are used during elections campaigns to convince swing voters to change their minds about a party or a person.

According to Fivethirtyeitght.com, in the 2016 US elections, there were about ten million swing-voters. That’s not a lot of people, but these voters probably played a role in helping Donald Trump get elected. Thanks to his fake-news campaigns around three-quarters of those voters swung toward him rather than Hillary Clinton.

The brief
We want to provide users with a tool to analyze pieces of news. We aim to give them a baseline to decide whether the news is fake or not.

• Giuseppe – Product Owner
• Eli – Branding & Marketing
• Gert – Front & Backend Developer
• Andrea – Backend Developer
• Roberto – Backend Developer
• Simone – UX/UI Designer 👈

We used the Triple Diamond flow (Research, Ideation, Prototyping&Testing) together with a Participatory Design approach that included all the team from the beginning.

Desk Research

We have done desk research on the relation between fake news and digital users.

According to statista.com, we have seen that only the 29% of US adults trust news media. In Italy, 40%. The main motivations of trust are: being familiar with how independent and unbiased a news website or app is (46%), recognizing the person or organization that wrote or created news (43%), other websites give the same information (43%).

We have seen that +55 y.o. (mostly living in the suburbs or in the country) have fewer “antibodies” against fake news. In “‘Fake news’: Incorrect, but hard to correct. The role of cognitive ability on the impact of false information on social impressions”, by Jonas De keersmaecker, and ArneRoets (Department of Developmental, Personality and Social Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium), individuals with lower levels of cognitive ability tends to have more difficulties to adjust their judgment after they learn that their initial evaluation about information was based is incorrect. Moreover, this remains after the explicit disconfirmation of the false information. The results indicate that the initial influence of incorrect information cannot simply be undone by pointing out that this information was incorrect.

According to “Fake news and COVID-19: modeling the predictors of fake news sharing among social media users” by Oberiri Destiny Apukea, and Bahiyah Omara, altruism inside social media communities is the most significant factor that predicted fake news sharing.

Finally, in “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election”, by Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, we see that fake news is extremely dangerous for our democracy because of its polarization power. People are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks, and this would increase the hostility between the factions.

Surveys

We ran a survey to investigate +55 y.o. users with lower cognitive ability to explore their habits in gathering news, both in Italy (54 respondents) and the U.S (32 respondents).
We have found out most of them feel like they are on point about politics and conspirations. Some of them felt like activists, and once they trust a source (could be a friend, a blog, an influencer, or a Media Company), they re-share content in chat groups on Whatsapp (Italy) or iMessage (U.S.). Most of them just read the title. Reading the whole article could be boring, and they feel like they got the point after a few lines of text.
They mostly use their smartphone.
They trust more journalists-influencers that support their political party.

UX Interviews

We had personally interviewed them. They told us they associate reading the news with these emotions: affinity, trust, fear, and rage.
They experience a rapid transition between them every day, and they feel that this exposes them to being more instinctive (and less thoughtful) in sharing.
They said that they would not trust an app or a website that would tell them if a piece of news is real or fake (this would just make them more suspicious).
They would be interested in a tool that supports them in identifying the pillars of fact-checking to make it quicker and easy to use.

Mind mapping

Then we mind mapped all the information:

User Personas

We converged all this information in two user persona:

Political color analysis 

We analyzed the relationship between colors and political movements in history, to design a brand with fewer political implications, and as neutral as possible for users:

Purple and yellow have fewer political implications, and they would appear more neutral for our audience. [source: Wearing your Politics on your Sleeve: The Role of Political Colours in Social Movements]

Design Strategy

After the research, we defined the Design Strategy. It came up clearly that we needed to diverge to come out with fresh concepts. We agreed in developing a complete mockup of the experience only after a good conceptualization.

Brainstorming workshop

At first, we had a remote brainstorming workshop. We made a hypothesis about a journey of fake news sharing, then we highlighted the problems and asked the team to brainstorm on how to solve them. Then we voted the ideas.

After the workshop, I worked on these outputs to define the user journey of our service.

Journey and Empathy Mapping

Then we designed the user journey. We mapped each step with possible users’ emotions and thinkings.

We identified these main steps:

Fake news is a sensible and subjective topic, that’s why we put so much focus on personal thoughts.

We need to build trust with users from the very first moment, so we agreed not to give them a result as “fake” or “real” but a list of KPIs with a clear score. Our purpose is not to convince them but put them in control to decide.

Problem reframing

Thank to these steps we reframed the problem like this:

“How might we allow users to easily check the reliability of a piece of news and report that to the community? How might we give them the right information that allows them to decide whether the news is fake or not?”

Concept

We wanted to build a Fact-Checking Report Creator to easily check:

It includes confidential material. Drop me an email at poli.simone09@gmail.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. I will be happy to talk about it together.