- Project 7
- Week 1
- Who is your user group?
Anyone interested in politics and news. - What is the exact problem?
Today’s news is often inherently biased and lacks nuanced journalism. Some more, such as breitbart news, and some less, such as reuters. With the recent surge of social media, a large share of unsuspecting readers fall into a so called filter bubble, i.e., they only see news of specific political backgrounds, which they are anticipated to like. Some think, this may lead to political extremism [https://www.connectsafely.org/social-media-can-lead-to-political-extremism/], further deepening preconceived opinions and ideas. Anyone interested in politics and news. - Where is your user group interacting with your software?
When the general public are using, e.g., social media, and want to fact check an article or get a different view on the topic the article is about. - When is the user group interacting with your software?
The “check” might be both 5 minutes for the particular single news and also longer time, depending on how much the user wants to learn about different sources. - Why do your users need this software?
We believe that the majority of readers in filter bubbles are simply unaware of other political views, but when notified of their biased opinions, are willing to get an overview of the entire political spectrum. Usually, people seek to find out the truth, making this software particularly interesting. - How do you want to solve the problem?
We want to provide a web page where users can provide an url of an article which, then, gets placed onto a political compass. Other articles of the same topic will be shown on the compass too.
Reflection
On our first meeting we decided to give ourselves some time to come up with ideas and look for possible interviewee. We presented each idea and after thorough discussion agreed on the final one that we will work on during the semester. We considered all the pros and coins and general details that we need at this stage. Formulating the pitch was quite straightforward after that. As our users group is quite wide we need to definitely work on narrowing this group of interests before starting gathering the data.