INFSOC

INFSOC - Application Web et mobile

Crowd-sourced application for news articles and studies validation

Goal

Design an adaptive and Innovative web-based mobile app with an ergonomic approach to offer users a tool to have verified and comprehensive information with different points of view validated organically through crowd-sourcing.

Challenges

The application must encourage users to contribute to or contest articles with references that will affect their validity and that will also be evaluated by users, without allowing "trolls" to promote false informations.

Realisations

User research

Biographical survey and quiz creation to conduct research on the behavior of readers of information on-line
Card sorting to validate and guide the information architecture
Usability testing and mouse-tracking

Design

Navigation diagrams and usage scenario
Design of the system's logic for the validation and gradation of articles and sources of information
Interfaces and prototypes design in Adobe XD and Invision

The functionalities have been grouped according to user profiles and taking into account usage scenarios. The approach in design is task-based with an objective as to simplify accomplishment of these tasks.

Five actors with three levels of users have been defined.

Unregistered user
Registered user
Certified user
Administrator
Automation of the system

Thus, the use of the software should be useful to users for:

Get new information from news articles or scientific studies
Check known information against other sources
Contribute to the knowledge base

Results

According to the survey's results, the incentive for users to input sources of quality for their references should be encouraged by rules in the system, such as a reputation system for users and the sources, and a greater impact on gradation for references than comments. Emphasis on certain interface elements should also be used to nudge the users' actions towards contribution.

The card sorting confirmed that dividing the content into groups wasn't useful because of the multiple categories an article can belong to. Putting emphasis on tags would be more flexible. Only 2 groups were created according to the type of elements of interest, news and studies.