Starting Work with Civic Tech DC
The persona I created based on interviews for creating the CIB Mango Tree, a project to create a program that will assist researchers in identifying coordinated Inauthentic behavior (CIB). Key observations include the lack of programming experience in most researchers, but a willingness to learn in pursuit of their goals. I also identified the reliance of the researchers' intuition to identify CIB, as opposed to technology, but an eagerness for assistance in identifying patterns in posts on comments from certified sources of political and health news.
In my networking, I encountered a unique suggestion on Meetup for an organization called Civic Tech DC, a "non-partisan, non-political group of volunteer civic hackers working together to solve local issues and help people engage with the city." I've been having a great time taking part in virtual hackathons and game jams for the past few months, so I wanted to check out what projects I could contribute to at these in-person events.
The one that caught my eye was the CIB Mango Tree project, a project to create a program that reporters and researchers could use to help them in identifying coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) online.
This includes things like false claims, harmful public health info, and general spreading of misinformation and disinformation that could be a threat to public health or used to influence politics.
It's named the Mango Tree in reference to the difficulty that is associated with the variety of ways that misinformation can be spread online, and how our goal -- identifying CIB in Reddit posts -- is the "low-hanging fruit" of them.
The project had already been well underway for a while before I joined up, already having a placeholder website to demonstrate how the product worked, with algorithms already devised to identify copypasta and coordinated posting. I spoke with one of the project heads and learned that the development was slowly organizing into a proper management structure, but they were still working on getting some things in order. No proper user research had been conducted to help guide the experience. I offered my services, and was given the opportunity to interview a number of subject matter experts in the field of political research from across the globe!
My first task was to familiarize myself with the current state of the project and learn what the functionality was. On top of this, I did considerable research into current efforts and programs to identify CIB used by journalists and researchers to see what needs we might be able to fill. Working with the entire team, I drafted a series of questions and an interview script to bring to my conversations with the subject matter experts and gain a better understanding of their experiences with CIB, using technology to identify it, and what they would like from newer technology tackling the subject.
So far, I've conducted four interviews with subject matter experts across the world (with more planned for the coming weeks. I compiled their feedback to create a persona (seen at the top of this post) and presented my findings to the team.
I gave the design team a short 5 min. presentation on my findings last week, and they were eager to pour over my results to find how they could tweak their design.
On top of this, I worked on some user flows to illustrate the current structure of our product's use, and how we might streamline it for users.
The current design:
And the ideal design based on the user feedback:
We meet bi-weekly, but have regular virtual updates and use GitHub to track ongoing tasks. My next set of responsibilities is to work with another UI designer on the team to iterate some sketches and mockups, and some UX copy for instructing new users on how to use the Mango Tree.
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