The Challenge
The average person spends less than 20 minutes a day reading the news. They are increasingly using digital sources to learn what's going on in the world. Many of us are familiar with scrolling through Facebook and seeing the same news publications and topics pop up over and over, with the same opinions being represented from the same friends. We wanted to end this.
The Solution
Lybra provides a revolutionary way of reading the news. The goal is to break people out of the echo chambers that exist and persist on other social media platforms. It encourages people to read the other sides of a story so that they can gain the most comprehensive understanding of world events.
How It Works
Lybra draws the day's top stories from six different publications. The publications are ranked according to the majority political affiliation of their consistent readership.
These publications, ranked from most left-wing to most right-wing, are: Slate, The New York Times, CNN, Yahoo! News, Fox News & Breitbart.
Users first choose a topic based on the day's trending stories. They can then view the headlines side by side from these publications for that day.
The full articles as they were shown in the original publications are also available to read through the app. Users can continue to read each article from the spectrum in order to understand the full story from a variety of perspectives.
The Design
Our design was informed by the idea of the political spectrum. While we recognize that this spectrum exists beyond a simple left to right line, we worked with this concept to simplify how we visually represented a complicated concept, and to address the affiliations many people typically claim to have.
We chose to focus our app for U.S. audiences and those interested in U.S. politics and news. We are seeing a left/right divide in the U.S. growing during the time leading up to the election and after Donald Trump became the President of the United States. For this reason, the Democratic symbol of the Donkey and the Republican symbol of the Elephant are used at each end of the spectrum to demonstrate the overall bias of the publication and its readership for each story.
Though most publications tend to veer more towards leftist opinions and perspectives, the publications we chose were taken from a spectrum created by the Pew Research Centre and, we believe, showcase a broad enough variety of perspectives to be able to represent the many varying opinions that exist among the American people.
The purple colour we chose represents the middle ground between, or the blurring together, of the blue and red colours that represent the left and right. This colour was chosen to make the app seem as objective as possible.
The Process
The earliest version of our design included a left and right side that drew from more than 50 publications and automatically adjusted one side to match the other as users scrolled through news stories from a particular topic.
The bigger the idea got, the more we realized we needed to downside and to focus on doing one thing really well. This is how we arrived at choosing a set number of specific publications, and to showcase the articles horizontally while at the same time demonstrating where each publication falls along the political spectrum that we created for the purposes of this app.
The Goal
Our app was driven by the idea of emotional correctness. Rather than doing or saying something out of fear or tolerance, we want people to understand others' beliefs and opinions, even when these threaten the legitimacy of our own beliefs and opinions. Understanding belief and opinion as existing on a spectrum allows people to recognize what joins them together, and to feel content with the fact that there will always be points of disagreement.
Emotional correctness teaches people to move beyond tolerance, to mutual respect and appreciation for others. Not only will this help to break the echo chamber that social media embeds so many people in, but it can also help to decrease the political divides that are growing across the world and that are based on hate and misunderstanding.
User Testing
User testing helped us to identify some design flaws. Our first tester wanted to click on the logos in the spectrum to access that publication's article. The slider is meant to be a visual representation of the political bias of each article, rather than a menu for navigation. We decided to add the logos onto the article images so that users could immediately see the connection between the headline, image, and publication.
We also found that users were more interested in the information about the author and publication than they were the individual headlines. Each user tried to navigate using the logo in the spectrum when browsing a topic to see that publication's article. We made the decision to link these with the articles since that was the most intuitive method for navigation as shown by our users.
PROMO VIDEO
Our use case video features a single person scrolling through the app, with information about the app and its uses explained in text throughout the video.
We want Lybra to be a very personal experience. It should be used to build well-rounded knowledge on the world's most important subjects. It is meant to break the cycle of how people receive and perceive the news, encouraging users to step outside of their comfort zones and consider a situation from a variety of otherwise conflicting perspectives.