BetterWorld

TL;DR

Core methods:

Summary

As a small team of Designers, Researchers, and Developers, we are worked to deeply understand, through research, how we might assist activist organizations better engage their users for more meaningful and long-term work. We designed, prototyped, tested, and developed a tool, BetterWorld, to combine the powerful effects of visualizing the nebulous work that is activism with a flexible, yet structured format for task and project management and visibility into institutional and group knowledge.

Through a series of focus groups and a range of interviews with Subject Matter Experts, End-Users, as well as leaders of organizations, We utilized a focus group approach to understand the general problem space and refine our research questions. Then we conducted an initial round of generative research to learn more about X, Y, and Z, through a Literature Review and qualitative interviews with two groups of users: End-Users who are users of these activist organizations, and stakeholders who are the leaders and organizers of these organizations.

From here, we had a sufficent depth of understanding to begin thinking about how we might address our research questions and craft a design that would benefit the end-users. Through a series of brainstorming processes, rounds of feedback and critique, as well as iterative testing and re-design, we created BetterWorld.

My focus:

Deliverables

• Report (December 2020)
• Prototype (December 2020)
• Prototype (August 2021)
• Prototype (August 2021)

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Problem Space And Context

This project was situated within the a semester long course, where we were challenged with a student-defined project to apply persuasive techniques learned in Geoff Kaufman’s Persuasive Design class at Carnegie Mellon University, within the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Our team focused on civic engagement with the goal of maintaining and increasing engagement among members of activist organizations. I found this topic area to be highly intriguing and right in the center of my interests to use my skills for projects, designs, and solutions that benefit others in the long-run. To understand and support activist work, we work towards addressing inequities systematically.

"How might we strengthen and increase engagement of actively participating members in social activist groups by encouraging them to stay involved longer in ways that work for them?"

Activism happens on a long-term scale, with work taking months or years to achieve desired results, and progress is often difficult to measure. In order to more effectively work towards their shared mission, activists need tools that encourage sustainable, long-term engagement. They need a solution that helps effort compound over time rather than die off, as well as more visibility into institutional and group knowledge.

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Process

We utilized a broad set of methods to initially ground us in the problem space, formulate our above problem statement, and hone in on an actionable set of user needs:

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Initial set of Research

Generative research through the New Metaphors activity Focus Groups

The New Metaphors activity is a fantastic way to collect generative research and insights about our research area, covering a large amount of ground in a short amount of time through first-hand reporting and discussion. This also is a fantastic way to garner empathy with our participants by hearing the problems and issues they face on a regular basis. This research also helped us narrow in our scope and target user groups for the remaining research.

Initial Interviews (Domain experts, end users, and community leaders)

We conducted primary research through extensive interviews to help us understand the problem space, critically analyze end-user needs and constraints, as well as understand how we might work within the processes of these organizations. We interviewed local organization leaders, academic researchers working in a similar space of activist organization, as well as several end-users to understand their wants, needs, desires and constraints. I led efforts of designing the research questions and interview questions for these sessions.

(Mini) Literature Review

A survey of academic literature across the fields of online communication, activist motivation and organization, as well as persuasive theories, helped us base our future research as well as our eventual design on substaintial previous evidence and work.

Usability testing and iterative design

Once we understood the problem space thoroughly, we ideated through three iterations of our prototype, with each round having end-users and leaders of organizations provide feedback, as well as going through usability testing with common user tasks. I led the main efforts of designing tasks and user scenarios for testing, as well defining usability metrics.

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Prototyped Solution

As of December 2020: The platform we designed incorporates persuasive techniques to help organizations visualize their progress. Our goal was to create an engaging virtual platform that could help organizations like CMU Against ICE facilitate team collaboration and intragroup connections. BetterWorld is organized into five main sections: World, Community, My Info, Projects, and Check Ins. Together, these sections create an intuitive hierarchy and flow, one that would promote group identity while affirming and aligning individuals with the group.

Feel free to explore our prototype at bit.ly/BetterWorldPrototype

World and Personal View

Users are able to visualize their group and personal contributions to the project. Current and finished projects are manifested into structures or items of the users’ choosing. With the ability to customize the items’ names and appearance, these may be tangible indicators of the organization’s group identity.

Community Pages

The Community page is a directory of all members within the organization. Members can learn about other members and the areas they are interested in. Members may also give “shout-outs” on virtual post-its that affirm and encourage others in their contributions.

Tasks and Projects

The Tasks page is designed to emphasize collaboration over individual work. This highlights group identity and uses social proof by making clear who is contributing and encouraging users who have not yet contributed to participate more.

Check Ins

We designed both group and individual check in pages that incorporate group- and self-affirmations. These techniques have been shown to help individuals with motivation and make them more equipped to deal with hardships they may face in activism work.

Going Forward

We are excited to expand on this work so far with further research in the spring semester. We aim to partner with an organization to collaboratively iterate on this design, implement a MVP that can be used, and test the effectiveness of the implementation and improve. This will include further refined interviews and other methods of assessing potential features and design ideas, such as "Buy-A-Feature" and Card Sorting. Lastly, we plan on disseminating this work as a workshop or conference paper to the HCI community.