Overview of Individual Assignments

After a decade or so of a relatively stable status quo, social media users are hungry for alternatives to the big platforms. Reddit has weathered a month of outrage, protests, and user migration. Similarly, turmoil at Twitter/X has caused users to flee to Mastadon (causing servers to temporarily halt signups to prevent meltdowns) or Threads (which became the fastest growing app of all time with 100 million signups in 5 days and promises to interface in a decentralized fashion). Perhaps most excitingly, many of these alternative platforms are being developed as interoperable open source projects, giving users the opportunity to participate in the design process via GitHub Issues (e.g., suggesting new moderation tools or rethinking how to quote posts).

As an intrepid new designer, you sense an opportunity for a new app! Over 6 individual assignments, spread out over the first 8 weeks of this semester, you will design and develop your new social media app end-to-end: starting by exploring some user needs in this assignment, then brainstorming novel designs to address those needs, implementing them as part of a full-stack web app, and finally testing your app with some target end users.

You are not required to adhere to the design of any existing social media platform. Moreover, we won’t be expecting your app to be designed and developed at the calibre of an existing social media app. Rather, think of your app as a proof-of-concept prototype: it should focus on a handful of novel and compelling design ideas, and communicate these ideas by demonstrating a robust and usable implementation. To aid you in this process, we will be providing you with starter code for both the backend and frontend, which you can then build off.

Your Tasks

For this assignment, you must interview two different people who use any social networking platform (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Twitch, Snapchat, TikTok, etc.). Each interview should last ~45 minutes, and should explore topics such as: how people use these platforms in their daily life; what benefits (if any) they get from them; what they enjoy (or don’t) about their interactions with the platforms; where these platforms fall short; etc.

Plan your interviews before conducting them:

  1. Start by identifying a hunch or theme you would be curious to learn more about through your interviews. This hunch does not need to be a concrete or specific design idea, but rather a scope that can guide and inform your interview process. Your hunch might be to explore a user population that you feel is underserved by today’s apps (e.g., “I would like to build a social media app for photographers, because Instagram and Flickr have abandoned them” or “How might I design a social media app for elderly people?”), or you might be curious about new classes of functionality that existing apps do not yet support, or do not support very well (e.g., “What are better ways to moderate posts and keep people safe on social media?” or “I would like to explore how generative AI can be used on social media”).

    Write down 1–2 sentences to summarize the hunch you’ll be exploring through your interviews.

  2. Based on your hunch, think about who might you interview, and why you wish to interview them. What would you hope to learn from them that you might not already know or can infer relatively easily? How can you use your interviews to explore a diversity of perspectives (e.g., one participant who uses only one social network and another who uses multiple, participants who are not affiliated with MIT or other colleges/universities, participants who are very different from you along some dimension, etc.)?

  3. Brainstorm conversation starters around a set of questions you are interested in covering, and develop a strategy for taking notes. (We offer some advice on both of these aspects in the section below.)

Conduct your interviews and then, for each interview, write a 1–2 paragraph report that summarizes each interview and analyzes some key takeaways. For instance, did a participant share a particularly memorable annecdote? What did you observe about their behavior that you found surprising or unusual (and why did you find it surprising/unusual)? What stood out to you in the conversation? Consider how you might quote participants directly to provide some interesting texture to your analysis.

Following these summary reports, bullet point 3–5 design opportunities you plan to explore in subsequent assignments. For each bullet point, spend a few sentences briefly describing what the opportunity you envision is, and why you think this opportunity is worth exploring (i.e., why might users care, what difference might a corresponding design make, etc.).

Submission Process

Submitting your work is a two-step process:

  1. Post your work to your Vitepress portfolio by the assignment deadline. Include your planning materials and raw interview notes in addition to your writeups. The specific structure and format of the submission is left entirely up to you and is part of the ongoing design exercise of developing an attractive and usable portfolio.

  2. Submit this Google form to finalize your assignment submission, also by the deadline.

You must complete both steps for us to consider you assignment to be submitted.

Rubric

The teaching staff will grade your assignment using the following rubric. Grading will occur qualitatively, and the teaching staff will conduct multiple rounds of collaborative grading, calibration, and cross-checking to ensure consistency. This assignment is worth 10 points. Submissions that meet the expectations (i.e., the Satisfactory column) will roughly map to a B (8/10). Submissions that exceed expectations will roughly map to an A (9/10), while submissions that require substantial improvement will be awarded a C (7/10). Note, individual rubric cells may not map to specific point values, and excessively long write-ups will be penalized.

Component Excellent Satisfactory Poor
Interview Plan Thorough justification for choosing interviewees. Both participant are not current college students/affiliates, or differ from you substantially in some way. Perceptive questions that cover a breadth and depth of issues. Anticipates some opportunities for follow-ups. Good justification for interviewee selection. At least one participant is not a current college student/affiliate, or differs from you substantially in some way. Explores a nice diversity of questions, but misses some opportunities for follow-ups or to explore new topic areas. Occasionally expects participants to think like a designer. Little to no justification for why interviewees were chosen. Participants do not represent very diverse perspectives. Several binary or leading questions. Frequently forces interviewee to think like a designer.
Interview Report Goes beyond a summary to richly characterizes surprises, contradictions, and tensions surfaced in the interview. Quotes from participants are well-chosen to add insightful texture. A well-structured report, but focuses primarily on summarizing results. A richer analysis could have provided more insightful takeaways to spur design thinking. Useful participant testimony is included but is sometimes redundant/repetitive rather than informative. Uninformative transcription of answers that lacks structure or yields a report that is too long or short. No (or too much) direct quotation from participants.
Design Opportunities At least 3 compelling opportunities, which do not suggest straightforward solutions, are bulleted. Every bullet conveys a crisp, descriptive definition of the opportunity. Explanations for why opportunities might matter are well-argued and well-grounded in evidence from the interviews. At least 3 interesting opportunities are bulleted. Bullet points largely convey precise definitions, but are occasionally too high-level or shallow in a manner that hinders understandability. Explanations provide reasonable motivation for why the opportunity is worth exploring, but could be better grounded in evidence from the interviews. 3 or fewer opportunities are bulleted, and suggest largely trivial or obvious solutions. Definitions are vague, and explanations are shallow.

Advice

  1. Get started early. Don’t underestimate how long it can take to plan, schedule, and conduct interviews. In subsequent assignments, you will begin to design and implement your app. So, investing time now will yield dividends later.
  2. Read around, and do some initial research. To have your interviews yield fruitful, generative, and actionable takeaways to spur your future design thinking, you will likely need to do more than just think really hard about what questions you will want to ask participants. Consider augmenting your thinking with some research about some of the key issues that appear to be driving the current frothiness around social networks, and the related social and ethical issues also at stake. Good sources of information include The Verge, TechCrunch, TechMeme, or the tech columns of the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.
  3. Find diverse interview participants. Chances are you won’t learn as much by interviewing MIT students (or students from other schools). Instead, think about who a broader set of stakeholders may be for your app, and where you might find them. Perhaps you can recruit participants from public locations (e.g., coffee shops) or other social media platforms (e.g., Nextdoor, or r/SampleSize). If you ask respectfully, people you approach will be willing to give you their time.
  4. Interviewees aren’t designers. Directed questions like “Why do you use TikTok?” or “What feature would keep you more engaged on BeReal?” are unlikely to yield very interesting answers. Instead, keep your participants focused on describing their experiences using social media. Your goal should be to evoke rich stories and emotions, which you’ll then analyze as part of your reports to spur your future design thinking.
  5. Go with the flow. Coming up with a plan for your interviews is important, but treat it as a guide and don’t feel obligated to stick to it word-for-word. Be prepared to veer off your plan if your interviewee surfaces something interesting or unexpected. Feel free to ask follow-up questions to probe more deeply. Don’t worry if you run out of time before you’ve asked all the questions on your plan.
  6. Do some observation. Seeing is believing. In addition to asking your interviewee a series of questions to answer, consider asking them to use their favourite social media app as they would normally. Observe how they use it, and pay attention to the details. For example, when do they click through to a specific post for more details? When do they like, share, or comment on something? What sorts of posts elicit what kinds of emotions in them?
  7. Take detailed notes. You won’t remember very much from the interview session, so be prepared to take extensive notes. However, it’s tricky to do this in the moment while still being actively engaged in the conversation. So, one option you might consider is recording the audio of your conversation. If you choose to do this, you must solicit consent from participants (verbal consent is fine). After the interview, you can then listen to the recording and take notes about things that stick out.