How to deal with a wicked problem: misinformation about Covid-19
Article written by Christelle Gobin, Bettine de Kruijf and Maaike Wachters.
For our second Ironhack project we got the following brief: “From selling fake coronavirus cures online to a cyberattack on hospitals’ critical information systems, criminals and bad political actors are exploiting the COVID-19 crisis, the United Nations has warned, as it also steps up its fight against a proliferation of false information about the virus. To overcome this virus, we need to promote facts and science. We also need to promote hope and solidarity over despair and division. The main question is, how might we fight the spread of misinformation, and instead promote scientific, safety, and health education?”
Okayyyy. Such a big question, where to start?! Well, the only thing a UX designer can do in such a situation: talk to as many people as possible.
Initial research: survey and interviews
In order to learn more about the exact issues that people have with (mis)information around Covid-19, we started off with a general survey and user interviews. We asked people how they get their information and which information they trust. When the results came rolling in, we seemed to have the same problem as our potential users: so much information we didn’t know what to do with it. We analysed our survey data and this brought us a few important insights:
Through the interviews we found that our users are people who lead busy lives, but have a real need for reliable information about Covid-19. At the beginning of the crisis they wanted as much news as possible, but once the first shock was over, they quickly tired of it and now they just want the official information. They want a quick overview of it, so they know what to expect: do they need to wear a facemask if they want to take the tram? Are they allowed to go to a restaurant? And definitely none of the sensationalized news, they only want to have reliable information. And preferably some positivity as well, these times are hard enough.
Our user persona is embodied by Anna de Vries, a 34 year old Dutch woman:
Fine tuning the exact problem we were solving
We decided to use an affinity diagram and mind map to structure our findings and be able to pinpoint an exact problem to find a solution for. We used the empathy map and user journey map to be able to get more insight in how our user feels and where the frustrations are that could lead us to opportunities for our solution.
The problem statement we came up with is: people living in the Netherlands who want to spend little time looking up the news, need to find a way to get Covid information that is relevant for them, because they are tired and overwhelmed by the amount of news and anxiety inducing information. How might we present Covid news to people in the Netherlands in time effective way, so they feel up to date and informed?
Armed with this specific problem we did some brainstorming exercises and used the insights gained from our research to come up with the following concept:
- We are developing an app, because people check news in “stolen moments” on their phone: when waiting for a tram, when in the toilet, when on a coffee break, etc.
- The app needs to enable our users to filter and personalize information, so they can only see what is relevant for them.
- It needs to be official information only, so people can trust that the information is reliable.
Concept and prototype
Lo-fi
We made a lo-fi prototype on paper first, and then moved to Figma to make it interactive. With this interactive prototype we could run a few usability tests. An important insight from our lo-fi prototype was that people wanted to see all the news first before they decided what to filter, so when we moved on to the mid-fi, we changed that.
Mid-fi
The full mid-fi prototype can be viewed here.
The app will show you all the news first (sorted by date and time), and then — through a pop-up — points out its main function: you can filter your news. Once you click the filter button you get taken to a screen where you can choose the topics that interest you, and then you will be taken to a screen where only the news about these topics is shown, categorised by topic and sorted by date and time. This provides our users with a quick and easy way to filter the news that they find important. Everything they don’t want to know about, they don’t need to see. The app saves their preferences as well, and if necessary, they can also be changed.
Testing the prototype
We tested the mid-fi prototype through in person usability testing with the Figma prototype, and through Maze. Our testers were asked to perform two tasks: find an article to read without filtering, and find an article to read by filtering first. Our users did not have any problems with these tasks. The unfiltered task had a success rate of 100%. The filtered task had a direct success rate of 50%, however, upon close inspection of the click paths people used, they only used one or two extra clicks to get to the desired page. So all in all, not a bad score.
What we did run into during our testing is that we had made our mid-fi prototype too fancy. We had included some colour and some pictures to make it look nice, but this caused our users to pay a lot of attention to the design during our usability testing, especially during the in person interviews. They would for example comment on the unfiltered screen being nicer looking (because of the pictures). However, they also commented on some actual usability issues, most importantly: The categories used to filter, and the clickability of icons.
What’s next?
For the next iteration of our app we will have to conduct more user research, to figure out what filters are most useful for our users. The filters we included in the prototype (restrictions, regional info, schools, restaurants, outdoor recreation) were based on topics that users mentioned during interviews, but during the testing they all asked for more filters to be included. We will need to do further research to decide on which filters exactly need to be added.
Also, a lot of our testers tried to click on the icons in our prototype. We had added those to make it more clear that there are different categories of news, but had not intended for them to be clickable. However, as this came up so often in the usability testing, it would definitely be something to work on in the next iteration. It could be a quick and intuitive way to filter information, and therefore add to the main functionality of the app.
And finally, one of the main things that came out of our research but that we didn’t focus on due to time constraints, was that people wanted more positivity. In our current solution we focused on being able to filter information as that seemed a very practical way to help people, but we didn’t do anything to add more positivity to people’s experiences with Covid-19 news. So that’s definitely something to look into for the future iterations, after the filtering functionality has been perfected!
Thanks for reading!