Easy News
Easy News aims to create a news platform where news pieces are modified, adjusted, and tailored by Psychiatry and Statistics professionals, in order to make the news more accessible to people with mental health issues, anxiety in particular.
A Columbia University UI Design Course Project
Sep 2021 - Dec 2021
Background Research
Target user population:
We have noticed some people around us would experience a really hard time reading and accessing news online during the year of 2020 and 2021 due to the on-going pandemic, worsening international relations, unsteady economies and stock markets, and more serious global warming.
There are people who are currently suffering from mental health issues, and they are not able to handle the sometimes exaggerated and way-too-negative news headlines that flow in every single day.This is not mentally healthy in a society that is already stressful and unfriendly to mentally soft and sensitive people.
Project Idea:
Our project aims to create a news platform where news pieces are modified, adjusted, and tailored by Psychiatry and Statistics professionals, in order to make the news more accessible to people with mental health issues, anxiety in particular.
To achieve this, Statistics and Psychiatry professionals will be accessing the website on one end, where Statistics professionals will be analyzing the news information and converting news info into easily readable and accessible numbers, charts and graphs. Psychiatry professionals will be annotating and marking the original news pieces with their professional knowledge in order to create a de-bias procedure, which could help anxious readers realize the probability of a certain event affecting each individual, and the severity of an event to one’s daily life. Other de-biased perspectives could also be provided.
Storyboard
Low Fidelity Prototyping
Design Loops
Loop 1
Problem
The biggest risk of this loop is to test the usability of the website. We want to make sure that everyone using our website feels comfortable with the news. How can the website help readers in a way that best suits their news reading habit, so that the users will not be lost when using our product and the algorithm will not misinterpret the user’s intention and needs?
Design process
we proposed some potential functionality that we want to include in our website and let target users’ rate which functionality they want most:
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segmentation by categories
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custom choice of news source
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negative / positive news (percentage could be adjusted)
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local news / global news
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like/dislike button for the news
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filter or blur negative news
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user profile of trigger words/recommendations
Evaluation
Evaluation Survey
1st interviewee feedback:
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Become anxious from traditional news websites like Washington Post and NYT, but not when reading them on social media websites, because the former is lengthy.
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He would prefer reading news from multiple sources, and cross-validate the facts. But he feels satisfied only when reading news that fits his point of view.
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He reads traditional news at night and other social media 10 times during the day. He thinks it is too much but does not want to lessen the frequency.
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Out of the solutions we proposed, he prefers a personal profile of trigger words, the website would blur out or eliminate the news containing those.
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He does not want to manually click the like/dislike button, but wants the algorithm to learn based on reading frequency on certain topics.
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He doesn’t like immersive reading(full screen, too large of one image) either because of its aggressiveness.
2nd interviewee feedback:
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Knows she would get stressed but still reads the news compulsively. So she prefers to have a limit on how many articles or times of reading. She also likes the tool to mark the keywords in the article and eliminate those afterwards.
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Because of compulsory reading, rather than a pop-up assessment, she prefers the algorithm to predict her mental overload of consuming on certain topics based on the frequency, then prompts her to stop reading news.
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The website offers a marking tool to let users mark keywords that they want eliminate.
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Having a section under each article that suggests actions to take when encountering a similar situation, as a reminder that actions can be taken.
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Provide an option to adjust the percentage of positive and negative news, so it can alleviate some mental load of negativity.
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Provide a report on news type and news consumption, and the one that has been blurred/filtered, for an informed reading experience.
Top rated solutions
Loop 2
Problem
What form the “potential solutions” should take? Are they going to be commercial advertisements, like “Purchasing Tesla is better for improving air pollution”, or “Getting this particular brand of air purifier that will help with air pollution”? Or more specifically, what exact advice, suggestions, resources, links, and information we could offer to solve the problem of news reading anxiety?
Design process
I designed a demo with all the different potential solution forms:
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commercial advertisement to products that could help prevent or solve the problem
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informational links like donation links to governments and nonprofits, academic explanation publications/ articles, and all kinds of emergency hotlines and organizations that could provide related assistance
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daily individual steps that can be acted on one’s own and involve nest-to-zero cost, and could together make a big difference.
Evaluation
As a Environmental Science major, this user herself is a professional working in the field of Forestry. She took the example of the fire in Australia and indicated that news reports on the fire deviated from reflecting scientific truth, from a professional point of view. She also mentioned the examples of lion trophy hunting in South Africa and GMO foods. Therefore, she suggested inviting professionals from all industries (natural science in this case) to do the annotation and provide more unbiased opinions and facts, instead of only Psychiatry professionals.
For potential solutions, she likes the idea of categorizing and filtering news according to different triggers and providing products that could be purchased to eliminate anxiety, but also mentioned that more immediately actionable, rather small low-cost, and low-stake steps should be shown. For example, short educational paragraphs on how to do systematic recycling in daily life, or something like how to reduce household waste in ten minutes.
Loop 3
Problem
Currently users do not have any control over their own situation of what words could be triggering and offensive. The website could overlook individual users’ needs. We also haven’t provided solutions for how to reduce users' triggered emotional reactions when trigger words are found.
Another risk would be examining the contents professionals produced. There should be some type of peer review mechanism.
Design process
Some possible solutions:
1. let the users select trigger words and store them in the personal profile
2. professionals can suggest alternative words
3. produce a weekly/daily report for users to stay informed
Evaluation
Three users were recruited. Their backgrounds are software engineers, and architects. They provided feedback on their normal reading experiences and what they would like to change. Then, each user is shown all the solutions, and is asked to use them in their most comfortable way.
Two of the users would like the professionals to mark the words and provide the alternative words, since they didn’t want to view the words at all. One user wanted more autonomy in choosing their own form of “filtered reading” which means that they didn’t want the professional to preselect and hide the words for them.
All of them liked the idea of having a report summarizing the reading experiences and habits so they know what they have spent their time on.
Notably, they wanted to know the name and background of the professionals who had changed the trigger words on articles, so they know the credibility is ensured.
High Fidelity Prototyping
