Secondary Research
Literature Review
Driven by the book "Truth Decay," authored by Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich, our team embarked on a journey to investigate one of the four interconnected trends that contribute to this phenomenon: blurring the line between opinion and fact, an increase in the influence of opinion over fact, disagreement about facts, and diminished trust in factual sources.
Napkin Sketch Presentation
Inspired by Don Moyer's "The Napkin Sketch Workbook," we crafted a storytelling presentation that visually depicted our understanding of "Truth Decay." We delved into the changing forms of medium and their impact on content consumption, emphasizing the merging of information sources into a single digital space. Our napkin sketches vividly showcased how this blurring of lines affects the audience's perception and ability to differentiate between opinion and fact.
Design Concept
The Intervention
Our intervention took the form of a weekly report, inspired by the Apple iOS system. Users would receive a report that visually representing fact and opinion. An interactive activity invited users to highlight and distinguish between factual and opinion-based statements, prompting thoughtful engagement with the content. Additionally, a section featuring diverse perspectives encouraged users to critically evaluate their own standpoint.
Target Audience
To effectively reach our target audience, we defined high school students as the primary users, with teachers, parents and corporate as key stakeholders. Recognizing the critical period of identity formation during high school, we aimed to empower students to be more discerning in their information consumption, fostering their critical thinking skills.
Concept Video
Our final design is showcased through a concise and impactful video, taking inspiration from Apple advertisements. The video demonstrates the integration of our solution within the digital system, showcasing its main functionality. Drawing upon the aesthetics and familiarity associated with Apple products, we aim to convey credibility, innovation, and user appeal. This video serves as a motivational introduction to our intervention, specifically tailored to resonate with our target audience.
User Interface Design
In parallel to the video, our design interfaces embraced the iOS design language, incorporating its typography, iconography, and color palette. By leveraging the familiarity that Apple has cultivated among its users, we aimed to capitalize on their training and experience, enabling quick adaptation to our digital environment. The adoption of the iOS design language ensures a seamless and intuitive user experience, facilitating easy navigation and instilling user confidence.
Notification
The way that Info Digest is introduced is through a push notification from the iOS default system. The notification reminds you that the report of your information consumption for the week is ready for you to review.
Report
Entering Info Digest through the notification, you will see a summary of your information intake categorized by color coded visualization of fact and opinion. From there, you can understand your reading habit at a glance.
For the second card here on the screen, the system is prompting the users to participate in an activity to reflect and decode the information.
Decode
For the first part of the participatory activity, the users are prompted to review a piece of information that they have read in the past week. We want our users to first position this piece of information on the spectrum of fact and opinion with their own precipitation. Secondly, we are prompting our users to decode the statement with the two colors of highlighter representing fact and opinion. Making the users think more carefully about the words being used to construct this statement.
The system will provide different prompt according to the user’s responses from the highlighting activity.
Fact
For users who highlight the statement mostly as facts, the users are prompted to select any options that they think make this statement factual. We took reference on the code of conduct of journalists to generate the options. After the selection, a second prompt would appear and here, we want to see if the users has change their decisions after thinking this twice.
Opinion
vice versa, same process and actions but the options are shifted to prompt users how highlighted more opinions than facts.
Other Responses
Finally, the users will see the accumulated answers of other users. The goal of this information is not to say the collective answers are right, but to show how people have different perspectives and what are the different rationals behind it.
Report
We want to leave the users with a critical mindset and become more mindful of how they are consuming information by taking a step to actively digesting them
so lastly, we are leaving them with this question: “how much of the information you are digesting are factual?” to inspire them to think beyond this activity.
Final Thoughts
Impact and Ethical Considerations
To further support users in discerning factual information, we explored incorporating elements of the journalist code of ethics. By integrating ethical guidelines, we aimed to empower users to navigate the information landscape with confidence and accuracy.
