WellRead

Step 1: System Design

Part I: System Diagram. Def: “The world of your product, its actors, objects, and relationships.”

Upon initial analysis of the problem statement, the team identified five primary actors:

1. Creator: any person or entity that creates an idea, thought, or emotion

2. Publisher: any person or entity that distributes the content (ex. New York Times, social media, etc)

3. Aggregator: any person or entity that consolidates new sources (Flipboard, Google news)

4. End Consumer: any person or entity that ingests the content

5. Influencer: any person or entity that can impact the ideas, thoughts, or emotions of the other actors

Part II: Wedge. Def: “Whatever it is—a killer feature, a barrier-to-entry—that puts your product on the map.”

The following wedges were defined to help identify a potential product feature or strategy:

• Transparency: Provide the end consumer the ability understand the intentions of the writer and/or possess the necessary facts to generate an unbiased opinion 

• Awareness: Inform users of biases that may exist within the messaging of the content or in the subject matter itself

• Balance: Generate aggregated content to provide an equal spread of views on a topic

• Personalization: Customize information available to the users to address any potential biases

• Information: Notify end consumers of obscured relevant facts surrounding a topic to provide further context for opinion formation

Step 3: Product Sketches

Product Sketches. Def: “A toolkit of means to collaborate, diverge, and converge on product ideas”

1. The team created product sketches for the original user flow individually

2. This process was comprised of developing “Mind maps”, “Crazy 8s”, and “Elaboration”

3. The following user story was agreed upon and used as the basis for our Crazy 8’s and Elaboration: “As an aggregator, I would like to present an unbiased view of articles to end consumers.”

4. The team voted on the top “Elaboration” (Yellow stickers) choices 

5. Final idea was chosen to be elaborated on, and the agreed upon version of product moved into its final round of sketched mockups (below).

Step 4: Team Narrative (Initial)

Narrative. Def: “Why your product matters to users and what it does, in a few sentences.”

In the era of the “Snapchat Generation” a tectonic shift has irrevocably altered the landscape in which content is syndicated and consumed. Attention spans have sharply diminished while the availability and access to content have drastically increased. More than ever, firms are jockeying for the scarce resource of attention through utility optimizing approaches such as content personalization. As information and content regarding polarizing topics spread faster than ever, a core tradeoff between personalized and diversified content has emerged. Internet stewards such as Google assume a challenging social responsibility in providing balanced views of polarizing topics to a generation of Snapchatters and Tweeters.

Currently, firms like Facebook have become leading news providers to the Millennial Generation with short, attention-grabbing headlines but incur a social cost of providing only personalized, biased content. The product we hope to develop will provide the current Snapchat/Millennial Generation (ages 16-30) an easily consumable news source that provides high-level headlines, infographic-style drilldowns, and additional resources to enable users to quickly digest complex and polarizing topics in an unbiased method that empowers users to understand their own biases and the biases of others.  

Step 6: Solution and Product Iterations

In the age of personalization, content is becoming increasingly tailored towards reinforcing perceived user biases. One unintended consequences of this is that users, specifically those with unformed opinions on polarizing topics, are less and less able to formulate their own opinions -- this filter bubble pushes their opinions towards the biases of their friends, family, and network. For firms like Google, who are charged with the responsibility of stewarding basic freedom and neutrality of the internet, this becomes a significant issue. There needs to be a medium in which users are able to push through this filter bubble and receive content that informs, empowers, and delights users.

Additionally, based on user findings.  

1. Almost 70% of individuals socialize with people who only agree with their views

2. Many people indicate that they would be willing to view different sources that oppose their views, but when asked, to list sources, very few actually read sources against their own view

3. 80% are willing to learn about opposing views

Solution

• Our solution is WellRead, which is a web based platform that aggregates news and reveals biases of articles, your network, and yourself

• By being more informed of these biases, users are empowered to form their own opinions

Medium Fidelity Mockups

We decided to start the homepage with a Snapchat-style, photo-centric rundown of the trending headlines. Once one of the top headlines is chosen, the user sees all the relevant topic articles, along with a bias spectrum that shows which political “leaning” the article is written from.

The Topic pages started out as something you could input your “reaction” to, in order to inform the data tracking for your profile, but primarily in the context of the emotions you tended to feel when reading. The idea was to try out this idea of simply providing the user with some more awareness about their general habits, rating the quality of articles, counting the number of articles read, shared, and presenting opposing viewpoints of their own. Below is the rundown of “topic articles” and the profile data to which it translated.

From these initial prototypes, we decided that it may be more effective and digestible to present users with a color-coded political leaning spectrum for each article.