Nudging Users to Combat Misinformation
My Role
UX Researcher
UX/UI Designer
Team
Solo Project - Ori Nevares
Skills
UX Research
UI/UX Design
Behavioural Science
Results
• Thorough research process to identify the landscape and current barriers in preventing the spread of misinformation
• Employed friction cognitive heuristic to empower users to spot misinformation
Timeline
Jan 2023 - Feb 2023 (1 mos)
Preview
Leveraging cognitive friction to empower users critical thought and identify misinformation.
1
Friction Nudge
An overlay prompt on users information sources that nudges them to think critically.
2
Gamification
Immediately view how your selection matches against the massess and third party fact checking.
3
Progress Tracking
View your aggregated consumption of information and learn how to improve your diversity and ability to spot misinformation.
The Design Process
Background
An increasing amount of misinformation is propagating through our digital devices and having real world impacts throughout our society.
The Problem
Due to the struggles in regulating misinformation, leading academics have labelled society entering a new era called Post-Truth.
The Goal
How could a design intervention help combat the spread and impact of misinformation?
My Approach
Desk research to establish the problem definition. Rapid ideation and testing to find a solution.
Desk Research
Journal papers, podcasts, books, and published journals were analyzed to better understand the current problem space and possible solutions.
Key Insights
Data was analyzed and coded into themes which resulted 4 key insights informing the design direction.
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias drives peoples susceptibility to misinformation and fakes news.
Decentralized Informaiton Sources
The sources by which we gain information are increasingly unregulated and opinion based.
Fact Checking
Efforts to teach people, define a single truth, or provide counter opinions can negative rebound effects.
Critical Thought
Encouraging peoples own capabilities in critical thought is a promising path forward.
Persona
A persona was developed to help ensure the design process was focused on a target user and rooted in empathy.
Experience Map
A process flow was created to better visualize and understand where a design intervention could be most impactful.
Concept Ideation
How might we nudge users to think more critically about the information they see?
Cognitive Friction
“Occurs when a user interface or feature forces users to stop and think, increasing cognitive load.”
Concept Ideation
A layer over the information you consumer to nudge critical thought.
Concept Ideation
An invitation to think critically about your the information you are viewing and then see how you compare to others and fact checkers.
Concept Ideation
A separate interface to showcase an aggregated summary of all the information you consume on your device.
Mid Fidelity
Stakeholder feedback was gathered and an heuristic analysis was done to iterate and produce mid fidelity mockups.
Design Solution
After heuristic analysis the prototypes were refined to high fidelity screens.
Reflections
Providing information to reflect on is not behavioural change.
The Context
Behaviours have many different motives and often behaviours stem from deep cognitive tendencies or emotional drives. Taking the time to understand the context the behaviour occurs in is key when ideating on which heuristics you can leverage. Failure to do so will result in blind applications and no results.
It’s in the Details
Behaviour can be influenced by very small and seemingly irrelevant details. In this project there was a known backfire effect when you try to label information as true, false, or right/wrong. I had to change the semantic colour and wording to be neutral to avoid triggering these much larger consequences.
Information is Not Behavioural Change
Many of my early ideations revolved around showcasing and outlining the statistics of the new information that one consumes in the hope that this knowledge would result in behavioural change. This is not a reliable strategy and it was not until I introduced the friction nudge where the behavioural change actually occurred which was to trigger ones own critical thought.
Website design and content by Ori Nevares