Assignment 2 - Divergent Design
Broad Application Goals
The name of the app will be Reportter.
Its user base will be reporters who want a convenient site to publish their articles to a large audience and people who want to interact with news reports in a fashion similar to how they would with posts on Twitter. It has been shown in the interviews that there are plenty of people who already use Twitter for news, so they all would be potential users of this new application.
The values it provides will be:
- to give reporters (especially those who had been excluded from traditional media) a free platform to publish news
- hosting reporters/articles with differing views on the same site to hopefully reduce polarization
- allowing every user to have their opinions heard, and thus promoting free speech
- increasing the quality of information on the internet
Brainstorming Concept Ideas
- There will be two different user types on the website: regular and reporters.
- Reporters will be able to post long, formatted articles that include images, citations, links, etc...
- All users will be able to share short, unformatted posts called opinions.
- All users will be able to comment on other people's opinions, comments, news articles, and specific sentences in news articles.
- All users will receive a feed of news reports and opinions on their home page based on their previous searches and interests
- All users will be able to downvote news articles/opinions they enjoy and downvote news articles they find to be misleading, which will then be used by the suggestion algorithm.
- All users will be able to follow other users to see all their activity on their feeds.
- Reporters will be able to share a bio about their work and their affiliations with any news agencies
- All users will be able to go to a reporter's page to see their name, bio, affiliation, all their reports and opinions, their total upvotes and total downvotes, amount of followers, how long have they been active,
- All users will be able to go to regular users' pages to see their comments, opinions, and reactions, (not upvotes or downvotes)
- Regular users can set their accounts to be private, so only their friends can see their comments and reactions.
- Reporters can mark their content as subscriber-only.
- Users can subscribe to reporters for a monthly fee.
- News articles have at most 3 tags that will be displayed with the title and also used by the suggestion algorithm.
- Users can search for articles, opinions, and comments using keywords.
- Reporter accounts require some extra validation to open
VSD Analysis
Insights
News articles that gain traction in Reportter, can be republished or used as a source in articles on other websites. Here, the people interacting with the article not through Reportter but through another medium would be indirect stakeholders. This could create a problem because some important context that was very apparent in Reportter could be lost somewhere else (# of downvotes, posters account, etc.). A possible fix would be to provide outside sources a format to link/cite Reportter articles with all this relevant info built-in
In countries with problematic political realities, reporters might want to keep their identities anonymous. Allowing this for all reporters would not be ideal, as accountability usually decreases misinformation and other harmful activities. A fix might be to allow reporters to be anonymous/semi-anonymous if they are from a determined set of locations with intense political repression.
Publishing articles on this website might become the work of the future, meaning reporters mainly make their living off the site. This could be a great thing for free enterprise: as setting up an account to start publishing would be easy and the reporters would have an equal environment to make money based on the merit of their articles. However, caution, and possibly cooperation with local authorities, might be necessary in the future to prevent harmful work practices like tax evasion, fraud, etc.
As a consequence of variations in human ability, some people might not be able to handle content about certain topics (war, disease, hunger, etc.), maybe due to past experiences or neurological conditions. Reporters can be given the ability to explicitly mark their content with a tag like DISTURBING CONTENT, or users might set up filters to block out all reports and comments that contain certain keywords.
Value Tensions: Privacy vs. interactivity: Users might want to make their posts private but this decreases interactivity. A good tradeoff in our app is to allow regular users privacy but not always reporters. Free speech vs. misinformation: Do we allow all posts, especially ones with misinformation? Some sort of centralized content moderation might be necessary when downvotes are just not enough. Free access vs. revenue: How excessive will the monetizations be, and how will they shared between the app and the content creators? May offer different pricings and deals for different contexts in the future.
Concepts
Article
Purpose: Display formatted news articles
OP: News articles written in some markup language are displayed on the website
Image
Purpose: Images to be displayed with other content
OP: Some content (news articles) can reference uploaded images, which are displayed inside that other content
Opinion
Purpose: Display short statements reflecting opinions
OP: Texts of a limited size reflecting personal opinions are posted and displayed on the website
Upvote/Downvote
Purpose: Allow site users to together quantize the quality of content
OP: Upvote content you like and downvote content you dislike. The amount of upvotes and downvotes any content has is then displayed and used to order content.
Comment
Purpose: Display short text directly related to some other content
OP: Site users post short texts related to other content as comments. Comments are displayed together with the main content
User
Purpose: Allow other concepts to distinguish between people and store data related to people across different uses
OP: To use most features of the app, everyone must create and login in as a user, which allows other concepts to uniquely identify who is currently using the app
Suggestion
Purpose: Automatically provide users with a stream of content they might enjoy
OP: Uses user's data (previous interactions, search history, etc.) and data related to the content (upvotes/downvotes, comments, tags, etc...) to automatically display content that might be of interest to users.
ReporterValidation
Purpose: Add extra identification to users authorized to post certain content to create accountability and credibility
OP: To post certain content (news articles), users must obtain validation, which might limit some of their privacy options and require they post some extra information about themselves
Bio
Purpose: Provide background info for users
OP: Users write texts about their background relating to the context they use the site for, which is displayed to all. Might be optional or compulsory
Follow
Purpose: Have quick access to posts that share a common characteristics OP: When users follow a description related to content (user, tag, affiliation), related content is listed in a special section.
Subscription
Purpose: Allow some content to only be possible through monthly-paid subscription OP: Content creators mark some of their content as paid. Only users who pay for the subscription can see or access this content.
Affiliation
Purpose: Display that an reporter is affiliated to some organization OP: Reporters can offically declare their affiliation to some organization, which is displayed on site
Tag
Purpose: Reflect quick information about the topic some content covers OP: Content can be marked with tags, which contain concise information about the text
Dependency Diagram
Here, I have used the notation of multiple arrows leaving some ConceptA from a single source to show that ConceptA needs at least one of the pointed concepts. For example, the Suggestion concepts needs one of {User, Opinion, Article}(what to suggest) and one of {Tag, Upvote/Downvote, Comment, Follow, Affiliation}(what to base the suggestion on)
UI Sketches
