"Inform" Design Sprint

The 2020 election was a pressurized environment with many differing opinions.

In 2019 I was part of a design sprint with a goal to establish a product vision that empowered people to decide for themselves which content to trust and engage with on Facebook.

The Outcome

Our design sprint resulted in nearly a dozen ideas that were pitched to News Feed's design leadership. Some were built and tested, others still remain in the backlog of ideas for subsequent election seasons.

188
ideas generated
7
design teams involved
4
weeks, start-to-finish

Background info for the sprint

As a collaborative design group from various teams (News Feed Integrity, AI, Misinformation, Stories, Public Conversations, and a couple more) we were looking to develop a north-star product vision in order to empower users with tools (context, information, design cues) so they know what to trust on Facebook.

A select part of the group went on a research trip covering different demographics (political leanings from right to moderate left, urban vs rural, multiple age categories) before the design sprint in order to help uncover a set of prioritized problems to go after.

The research was focused on:

  1. Information processing and evaluation: How people figure out how to trust information?
  2. Self-awareness and diversity: Do people understand if their network is biased?
  3. Controls: What level of controls people want to see/have?

Four "people problems" we aimed to solve:

1

Corroboration

"Facebook doesn't give me tools to corroborate with other sources"
2

360-degree view

"I want to see the 360-degree view of the facts to make my own decision"
3

Controls

"I see a bunch of stuff in my feed I don't want to see"
4

Skepticism

"I'm scared to post/comment without doing a lot of research first"

How to handle comments

Out of the larger list of themes we’d identified, we wanted to focus on the following two for the comment browsing experience:

  • Corroboration
  • Controls

The comment section can get heated during political season and it’s easy to get lost in a sea of negativity, or to get bombarded with people quoting things that someone actually never said.

So we created a couple concepts in an effort to show how we might alleviate those concerns.

A concept showing how comments could be categorized for more intuitive browsing

A concept showing how we might add a feature allowing someone to use a “quote” format when linking an article 

Providing additional context

When it comes to providing additional context, the two people problems that were most applicable were:

  • 360-degree view
  • Skepticism

People have their own personal reasons for choosing which sources to trust, so we had to be very careful to provide additional content that was non-biased.

We created a few concepts that showed different ways we could provide additional coverage on whichever topic might be interesting.

A concept for how to surface related Stories content from trusted news sources.

A way we might leverage Stories to provide a daily digest from trusted news sources you’ve chosen.

A way to surface links to related articles for easier corroboration on your terms.

Key Learnings

The most impactful thing I learned from this project is the importance of a non-biased opinion when creating a platform for sharing and discussion. Emotions run high when political season is in full swing, and criticism will be brutal if bias is baked into our designs.

I also learned the power of a well-executed design sprint. In just four short weeks we came up with nearly 200 ideas, and rallied to rapidly prototype high-fidelity, ship-ready concepts.

Last, I walked away with more of a desire toward cross-team collaboration. The variety of thoughts, opinions, and research-based context was so rich with such a diverse set of expertise in the room.