Project Summary: Design a native mobile application and a companion web application to setup and conduct social media experiments studying the behavior of people and how they react to politically polarizing content.
Project Overview
The Polarization Lab at Duke University brings together scholars from the social sciences, statistics, and computer science to study how to bridge America’s partisan divide. As part of this effort, they wanted to create a state-of-the-art controllable environment to conduct their groundbreaking research, analyze study participant behavior, and utilize AI technology to automate some of the research tasks associated with these efforts.
Working as project lead, I developed the overall product design strategy, assisted and supported my team, and facilitated all of the project related meetings and workshops with the Polarization Lab team.
Discovery, Design, Build
Going into this project, I knew that there would need to be a good deal of aligning and unpacking concepts and ideas with everyone on the team. While the stakeholders knew what they wanted from a 30,000 ft view, turning those objectives into practical functionality would be a considerable challenge. It was important for the discovery phase of the project to be comprehensive and involve representatives from each of the disciplines involved. We set up a regular cadence of check-in meetings between the stakeholders, designers, and developers to converge and discuss our ideas, problems, roadblocks, and progress. Not only did this help with aligning an understanding about the project, it also created a great deal of buy-in from everyone involved and felt much more like a collaborative effort rather than a “throw it over the fence” engagement.
One of the most complicated design aspects of the application was creating a simple enough interface for researchers to intuitively understand as they were setting up experiments by creating variables that impacted study participant groups in varying ways. By creating a single “control” environment then multiple “variant” environments, researchers could pick and choose specific elements within the participant application that could be altered based on whatever hypothesis they wanted to test. To determine how this interface would function, we included researchers in our design discussions and developed several conceptual models to validate and communicate how this functionality might work.
Design Exploration: We also worked through several iterations of the application’s flow to land on a model that would work well for users and be straightforward to not overburden developers.
Each section of the app would then have a user story map built out so that each member of the team could effectively and accurately estimate effort and time to build. This allowed us to create a staged approach to an MVP, allowing developers and designer to work in tandem, leaving a robust backlog of features to add if elements within an active sprint became blocked.
Live Update in Miro
As we worked, we built out the application flow, included user-stories / feature cards connected with Jira as well as the current version of the screen linked directly to the frame in Figma in one central Miro board. This system created a seamless and constantly up-to-date “central source of truth” which was critical to maintaining clear understanding and preventing bottlenecks and assumptions.
Closing Thoughts
While this project is still in development, the Polarization Lab team is extremely satisfied with the design and intended functionality of this innovative system. Feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss details about this project and for some additional samples of screens or UX artifacts we generated.
