Noded

Noded is a social media platform designed to stop the spread of misinformation. It leverages verified news sources, community reporting, and fact-checking tools to ensure accurate and reliable information for its users.

Our Problem Area

Research Process

Methods

We chose the specific order of Questionnaire, Interviews then Online Ethnography because it allowed us to collect a large volume of data which we were then able to narrow down. As a result of this structure, we were able to get a clearer understanding of what problems to look for.

• Questionnaire:
• 1. How old are you?
• 2. What is your gender?
• 3. How often on average do you access the internet? Tick all that apply
• 4. What social media platform/sites do you interact with regularly in the week?
• 5. Where do you obtain most of your news from? Tick all that apply
• 6. How often do you worry about misinformation on social media?
• 7. How frequently do you conduct additional research after learning about something on the internet?
• 8. Have you ever reported a post for misinformation? Why/why not?
• 9. On a scale from 1-10, how well do you think current social media platforms handle misinformation?
• 10. Have you ever accidentally shared misinformation online?
• Interviews:

• Online Ethnography:

Synthesis

• Affinity Diagram:

We used affinity diagramming to analyse our qualitative data collected in our interviews, as well as a few insights found in our online ethnography and survey data.



• Personas:

From the findings of our affinity diagram, we created three personas to create an organic representation of our data as well as our demographic.

Our Three Personas were:

• 1. Rachel, the university academic internet user who represents the majority of our young adult demographic.
• 2. Tom, the full time warehouse worker, represents our secondary non-university student young adult demographic.
• 3. Harry the retired entrepreneur, who represents the smallest segment of our demographic.






• Storyboards:

To further represent our findings we created storyboards for our personas. Each storyboard demonstrated problem scenarios based on key pain points in our findings.





Insights:

In total we uncovered 3 primary user insights from our findings:



• 1. Combating misinformation shouldn't place a burden on the user
• 2. Users are concerned of the influence of misinformation on other users
• 3. Users are willing to help take action to remove misinformation online if the topic is important to them

Design Process

Ideating

Reverse Thinking

To encourage lateral thinking separate from our research during ideation, reverse thinking was used as a fun and creative way to prompt new ideas and approaches to our problem area. With this approach we considered, “How could we make identifying, reporting misinformation as difficult and burdensome as possible?”.

We came up with three ideas from this method which were the following:

• - A social media platform which has zero accountability or guidelines.
• - A design where the report button is removed.
• - A TRUE or FALSE fact checker.

These designs emphasised the importance of knowing the nuances of handling misinformation as most facts cannot just be labelled as true or false because often, the truth is more complex than that.

Initial Design:

Noded - Anti Misinformation Platform

The idea we came up with after analysing our research insights and ideations was to create a crowd-sourced news platform.

The thinking behind this idea was to leverage the goodwill of online communities while also lessening the burden on the user to address misinformation by making the process quick and easy.

There was also an element of gamification in the platform as after a report is made, it is reviewed and if successful the user is given positive feedback from app notifications as well as points for a badge system to reward accurate reporting.

Wireframing

We created six sets of wireframes for the six main features of our application to be used for usability testing. This was done to uncover any flaws in our current design so we could iterate and design for any problems that the users found.

• 1. Content Reporting

• 2. For You Page

• 3. Information Source Node Tree Map

• 4. View User Profile

• 5. Comment/Discussion Feature

• 6. Adding Information to an article

First Round Testing

Our user testing of the wireframes were structured as a Cognitive Walkthrough followed directly after by a System Usability Scale (SUS) Survey.

• Cognitive Walkthrough:

We chose to use a Cognitive Walkthrough because at the current level of fidelity, we were looking to see if the user could understand the tasks of our product and so we could address potential challenges to users further down the line and refine them.

We tested for effectiveness, efficiency, utility and safety and in total we tested six experts with two of them failing at commenting and one failign at navigating the for you page.



• System Usability Scale:

Utilising a SUS allowed us to quickly get direct and efficient feedback after user testing.

Insights:

From our testing we found that:

• 1. Our design was confusing to new users.
• 2. Need for navigational clarity, greater feedback for reporting and adding information.
• 3. Design needs clearer and consistent information hierarchy.

Prototyping

Low-Fidelity Mockups

Taking on the feedback from our research, we created a set of Mockups for Noded with the following refinements:

Refinements

Colour Coding: to add clarity to users for what topic they relate to.

Sizing Difference: understand hierarchy, easy to view for users, so they can easily nvigate to relevant articles.

Spotlight Tool: improves utility, users can filter search results with greater precision.

• 1. Content Reporting

• 2. For You Page

• 3. Information Source Node Tree Map

• 4. View User Profile

• 5. Comment/Discussion Feature

• 6. Adding Information to an article

Second Round Testing

• Expert Testing:

We conducted expert testing to identify if our mockups solved the existing problems that were brought to our attention at the wireframing stage.


• Thematic Analysis:

Building on our expert testing we wanted to identify the main themes of the second layer of testing to amplify our insights. This added a structure for us to follow when deciding what altercations and refinements needed to be made in the final mockup of our design.




• Severity Ratings:

We conducted severity ratings for each individual feature, this was crucial in ensuring we took all the needed changes into consideration and were ready to start implementing those changes for our final mockup.

Hi-Fidelity Mockup