We created an online magazine that is trying to combat algorithmic bias — here is a UX case study to show you how
The Information Age might have left us with information at our fingertips, readily available at a person’s every beck and call, but the question remains: has this made us smarter?
The media landscape, as robust and dynamic as it is, has changed drastically over time. And with it, so has the ways in which we consume information. According to Miller’s Law in an article by Incharaprasad Miller’s Law: Designing for Memory Span, Miller suggests that “the number of objects an average human can hold in their memory is about seven.” It is important to note that it isn’t the absolute value of seven, but rather, as the article continues to dissect, it is the concept of “chunking.”
And while the digital press has seen substantial growth in recent years, with the social media landscape propelling information sharing to new — and sometimes biased — frontiers, we were briefed to design a responsive online platform for a magazine. So, naturally, we took all the aforementioned info into consideration and designed our app, Brainwash.
To better understand where this app is headed, let us define what pluralistically and critically mean in this context. According to the European Commission and Reporters Without Borders, media pluralism can become a complex issue. In the following paper, there are two definitions of pluralism:
Media pluralism can either mean a plurality of voices, of analyses, of expressed opinions and issues (internal pluralism), or a plurality of media outlets, of types of media (print, radio, TV or digital) and coexistence of private owned media and public service media (external pluralism)
What this technically means in summary is that pluralism is when:
- Business models vanish
- There is an emergence of new players
- Content is no longer king (it is now rather seen as an enabler to drive technological advancements)
- Editor vs. Algorithm — this can develop a range of professional, ethical and regulatory questions
Media pluralism alone cannot stand by the notion that there is more than one acceptable way of looking at things. While this might be true, looking at content and information critically is also important. According to the Center of Critical Thinking, as referenced in the following Poynter article, critical thinking is:
The intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualising, applying, analysing, synthesising, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
With this background knowledge, we take you back to the brief:
While the media landscape continues to evolve, this evolution reflects new trends and consumer experiences. Within such a dynamic market, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism provided an extensive analysis of current trends in both media (digital and print) for 2023.
Key insights from the report include:
- The impact of recent global crises, such as the cost-of-living crisis and the war in Ukraine and Palestine, has accelerated shifts towards digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environments
- Only about 22% of respondents across various markets start their news journeys with a website or app, a decrease from previous years, indicating a shift towards social media and mobile aggregators for news access
- A significant portion of news consumers (36%) often or sometimes avoid news, with a preference for positive or solutions-based journalism
We were expected to work in pairs, so I worked with Reyes Ruiz, for two weeks to design our online magazine.
User Personas:
For this project, we were provided with user personas based on the Reuters study. They were as follows:
1. The Digital Navigator
Age Group: Predominantly younger, possibly Gen Z or younger Millennials.
Consumption Habits: Prefers to access news through side-door routes such as social media, search engines, or mobile aggregators rather than directly visiting news websites or apps.
Interests: Leans towards influencers or celebrities for news over traditional journalists. Shows a significant interest in platforms like TikTok and other video-led networks.
Engagement Level: Engages less frequently with online news and shows declining interest in traditional news sources.
2. The Traditionalist
Age Group: Likely older, possibly Baby Boomers or older Gen X.
Consumption Habits: Continues to value traditional media formats like print newspapers and TV news, despite the overall decline in these mediums.
Interests: Shows high interest in in-depth, well-researched journalism and may demonstrate loyalty to specific news brands.
Engagement Level: Regularly consumes news but may be part of the demographic experiencing a decrease in interest in news (down to 48% very or extremely interested from 63% in 2017).
3. The Selective Scanner
Age Group: Could span a range of ages, but likely includes a significant portion of Millennials.
Consumption Habits: Carefully selects news sources and might periodically avoid all sources of news or restrict news consumption to specific times or topics.
Interests: Prefers positive or solutions-based journalism and is less interested in the big stories of the day.
Engagement Level: Represents the group of consumers who avoid news often or sometimes (36% across markets), focusing on specific interests or topics rather than broad news consumption.
For this project, we decided to focus on the Digital Navigator, aka the GenZ and younger Millennial target audience.
Our Approach:
We used the Design Council’s Double Diamond model to clearly understand the brief’s objectives and drive our research to a place where we could obtain clear insights, themes, and opportunity areas to develop How Might We solutions. From here, we were able to create a final brief that would help us to ideate the possible design solution through clear ideas and iterations — ultimately answering the brief.
DISCOVER PHASE: The Context
We conducted primary and secondary research and found that the average person has up to 7 hours of screen time per day, according to a research study by EXPLODING TOPICS. This is screen time increases if a Gen Z person to 9 hours. The daily screen time has increased by nearly 50 minutes per day over the last decade. Eighty per cent of Gen Z users use streaming services, according to this Gen Z’s Digital Discovery: Strategies for Brands to Connect Report.
When it comes to news consumption, we found that:
- 43% of Gen Z’s engage with news sources through sharin on social media, texting and emailing friends and family (Source)
- 38% of Gen Z actively seek out news media contant in different ways
- 15% get their news from TikTok
- Gen Zers trust people like themselves twice as much as mainstream medai news for fact-checking
- And up to 57% of Gen Zers strongly agree that social media is a more convenient way to consume news (rather than using internet searches, websites or apps)
- And whilst relying heavily on social media platforms, 65% Gen Zers use YouTube, 43% TikTok and 40% Facebook when self-educating
These statistics were obtained from the 2023 Gen Z Trends, Facts & Statistics & Media Consumption report conducted by Britopian. And whilst relying heavily on social media platforms and peers to seek out relevant information and facts, we carefully considered this insight when designing our application. We had to ask ourselves: how can we create an online publication that can help stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation?
First, we had to understand how Western media bias works. The chart below helped us to navigate this complex system so that we clearly understand where our information is coming from and it helped us navigate news sources.
DEFINE: What is what and how do we solve the problem?
We wanted to showcase our findings in an unbiased way, empathise with our future users, and address the fact that there is mistrust in mainstream media and news outlets. In order to do this, we had to dissect what misinformation and disinformation are. Dictionary.com states that misinformation is “false information that is spread, regardless of intent to mislead,” and disinformation means “false information, as about a country’s military strength or plans, disseminated by a government or intelligence agency in a hostile act of tactical political subversion.”
Our research gave us insight to what our Gen Zers say about the media, we elaborated on the user persona and created a personalised archetype. Meet James Rodríguez…
This then led us to our problem statement:
Creating a problem statement helped us to identify ways that could start to debunk the complex media systems and propel us to create a solution that is unbiased and pluralistic. The key pain points were defined to drive the development of the MVP and create How Might We’s that are attentive to the user’s pain points:
DEVELOP: How to address the problem
Because this was the MVP version of the application, we used the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritise which features we could design within our 2-week time frame. The most important features for us were to include a fact-checking meter to help users avoid fake news or gauge which media bias the information has. We thought a good approach would be to incorporate a new thermometer.
Other important features to include would be chats for each content channel that would be available on the app, with news and social media integrators for users to fact-check the information themselves. We wanted to break algorithmic bias by ‘randomising’ the content so that users could be able to read about the same topic from a left-leaning, center and right-leaning perspective. The main formats for the application would be videos with short text summaries, as well as a personalised feed depending on the user’s topic of interest.
As mentioned, the 2-week timeframe limited us certain features and while would have liked to, we could not originally track the origin of all the information that would be presented in the app. We would use UX-copy to communicate this to the users to create transparency. For future developments of the app, we thought that creating subscriptions and premium plans would help content producers to keep reporting (solely) for Brainwash.
It was important to check our validity in the market so we did a competitor review to see other online magazines and publications and their content.
Competitor 1: DW Planet A
- A YouTube channel focused on climate change
- Their target audience consists of 25–40 years old who are cognisant of climate change and want valuable and credible sources to understand the topic
- They have a comments section with a main online page — affiliated to the Deutsche Welle news broadcaster
- Their advantage is that they have established credibility for their news already – as well as a large online community and affiliation DW News, which gives them journalistic credibility
- The content is skewed towards an audience who is already looking for this type of content and is knowledgeable about topics on climate change, the environment and scientific developments
Competitor 2: Poynter Institute
- Poynter is a nonprofit media institute and newsroom that provides checking, media literacy and journalism ethics training to both citizens and journalists
- Features offered are: a newsletter, fact-checking, media literacy, ethics & leadership, featured training, contests for media professionals
- It has strong credibility
- If a person is not interested in media literacy or doesn’t understand the media landscape in a lot of detail, this platform may seem quite niche to them
Our solution was simple. We wanted to create an application that targeted Gen Zers, avoided text in long formats and helped users to create their own opinions about the information they consume through trustworthy sources.
Moodboard & Style Tile
Our solution aimed to create a dynamic and energetic look and feel to the application. With collage elements focused on the mouth and bright neon colours, contrasted against a peachy background in hopes of empathising with the Gen Z user. We wanted to build a brand doesn’t follow traditional norms, but could be adaptive and collaborative at the same time.
These main brand attributes were incorporated into our style tile. As mentioned, the bright colours of orange and neon green, accentuated with violet-blue, evoked energetic feelings to create entertainment and joy when consuming information. The violet-blue was used to create trust and professionalism. The icons and buttons followed organic forms and were rounded to stimulate dynamism and flexibility.
DELIVER: How did the app come together
We started with the user onboarding. Users could create accounts or sign up directly with their Google accounts.
Depending on the user’s interests, a list of professional content creators, influencers and specialists is provided, but we have given the option for the user to decide if they want to pick the topics of interest or ‘go random’
Once the user is on the homepage, the list of news sources appears with stories related to their selected topics. We do encourage users to choose the ‘go random’ so that the information presented isn’t bias and actually faciliates them into forming their own, educated opinions. While scrolling through the feed, a user can then decide if they would like to listen to a podcast, watch a video or read summary texts for the information. They then have the option to go directly to the video feed. We followed Jakob’s UX Law of Consistency and Familiarity, so users would be familiar with this feature if they were avid TikTok users.
We want to encourage users to check out a broad range of sources, and to look for additional opinions and scientific references to their opinions. It is advised in the application that the user looks into the content creators they are obtaining information from. The user can do so my looking at the content creator’s profile.
Responsive Design:
We did responsive designs for mobile and desktop to facilitate the usability and accessibility of the Brainwash app to obtain a higher user volume. According to the Interaction Design Foundation, responsiveness is “possible thanks to media queries, allowing the design to adjust automatically to the browser space to ensure content consistency across devices, and design elements being sized in relative units (%)”
We did the responsive design so that users could keep up to date with current affairs and their topics of interest while at work, for example.
Next Steps:
We conducted usability testing, and overall, people were interested in the idea of our online magazine, but it was time for us to broadly validate our prototype. We want to develop this MVP to include a thermometer that accurately reads the media bias of each post. This would be a great data challenge and would have to incorporate unbiased and well-researched insights into how to develop such a feature. We also want to include premium subscriptions to make the tool more collaborative.
