Twitter, the social networking platform, has fallen on hard times. It has missed expectations for user growth and revenue, has struggled to ship compelling new features for several years, and has a problematic track record of protecting user security and privacy.

As an intrepid new designer, you sense an opportunity for a new app that you call Fritter — a web service for frittering your time away, that clones the best parts of Twitter and extends it in exciting new ways. But before you get deep into designing and coding Fritter, you want to make sure that your hunch is well-grounded in user needs, and that it won’t suffer from the same social and ethical problems.

Purpose: This assignment will give you experience with (a) conducting needfinding interviews, and (b) thinking through ethical design considerations following the Value Sensitive Design (VSD) framework.

Your Tasks

  1. VSD provides 4 dimensions (or criteria) for analyzing designs: stakeholders: identifying the people who directly or indirectly may be impacted by the design; time: thinking through the short, medium, and long term implications of the design; pervasiveness: imagining the systemic effects that may result if the design is broadly adopted; and, values: determining how the design affects what people consider to be important with respect to autonomy, a sense of community, democratic expression, inclusion, fairness, etc. For each of these criteria, VSD offers a series of prompts (download them on Canvas) to spur your analysis.

    For each of the 4 dimensions, pick 2 prompts and apply them to Twitter as it exists today, or the opportunities they suggest for your app, Fritter. For instance, what challenges might someone experience when a Twitter account needs to change hands? How might Twitter grapple with crossing national boundaries (e.g., complying with takedown notices issued by governments)? How might Fritter promote adaptation, and positive lifestyle changes? Document your analysis in a manner that fits the prompt. This may include a richly annotated screenshot of relevant user interface elements, narrating over a short screen recording, and/or a brief (~150 word) written paragraph.

  2. Augment your VSD analysis by conducting two interviews with people who use Twitter or other social networking platforms (e.g., Twitch, Snapchat, TikTok, etc.). Each interview should last 30 to 45 minutes, and should explore topics such as: how people use these platforms in their daily life; what benefits they get from them; what they enjoy about their interactions with the platforms; where these platforms fall short.

    Before conducting any interviews, think about who you might interview and why you would want to interview them (i.e., why is their perspective important? What would you hope to learn from them that you might not already know? Are you able to interview people outside of MIT to gain a broader perspective?). Next, brainstorm 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). Include these planning materials and your raw interview notes as part of your final deliverable on your Jekyll site.

    For each interview, write a two-paragraph report that summarizes the highlights of the interview (e.g., anecdotes your subject related, unusual observations, etc.). Follow this summary up with a one- or two-paragraph synthesis that reflects on what you learned from the interview (e.g., what surprised you, what contradictions or tensions did you identify in what interviewees said, how might the interview focus or guide your future design process, etc.).

Submission Process

Submit your work by posting it to your Jekyll portfolio by the assignment deadline. The specific structure and format of the submission (e.g., adding it as a blog post or page, splitting the deliverables across multiple posts/pages or consolidating them as a single one, the permalink/URL format, etc.) is left entirely up to you and is part of the ongoing design exercise of developing an attractive and usable portfolio.

Rubric

The teaching staff will grade your assignment using the following rubric. This assignment is worth 10 points. Submissions that squarely meet the expectations (i.e., the Satisfactory column) will be awarded a B letter grade (roughly, 7.5/10). A grade of A will map to roughly 9/10, while a grade of C will map to 6.5/10. individual rubric cells may not map to specific point values.

Component Excellent Satisfactory Poor
VSD: Stakeholders A crisp and thoughtful analysis of how Twitter affects a diverse range of stakeholders that goes beyond well-known issues covered in the press. A good analysis that grapples with Twitter’s impact on diverse stakeholders. More research and reading around the subject could help push the analysis further, however. A shallow analysis that considers only a narrow range of well-understood stakeholders, or provides only a token, cursory nod to broader stakeholder impacts.
VSD: Time A crisp and thoughtful analysis that highlights tradeoffs in Twitter’s design when users engage over different time scales. A good analysis of using Twitter across different time scales. But the analysis could more deeply uncover tensions that these time scales impose. A shallow analysis that does not detail the implications of different time scales on Twitter’s design.
VSD: Pervasiveness A crisp, well-researched analysis that goes beyond issues Twitter is already experiencing due to widespread use. A good analysis of the pervasive use of Twitter, but it remains primarily grounded in current issues Twitter is experiencing. Additional research could help envision future positive and negative impacts of pervasiveness. A shallow analysis that provides brief, insufficient treatment of the issues.
VSD: Values A crisp analysis that provides careful consideration of how different values should or should not be manifest in Twitter’s design. A good analysis of the impacts of different values on Twitter’s design. But the description could delve deeper into issues that might arise in attempting to aspire to the stated values. A shallow analysis that provides brief, insufficient treatment of the issues.
Interviews: Plan Good justification for choosing interviewees. At least one participant is not a current MIT student/affiliate. Perceptive questions that cover a breadth and depth of issues. Anticipates some opportunities for follow-ups. Good justification for interviewee selection, but a more diverse selection could have yielded a richer set of stories. Explores a nice diversity of questions, but misses some opportunities for follow-ups or to explore new topic areas. Occasionally expects participants to be a designer. Little to no justification for why interviewees were chosen. Several binary or leading questions. Frequently forces interviewee to be a designer.
Interviews: Report 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 results could be conveyed at a better level of detail. Chosen participant testimony could be more useful. 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.
Interviews: Synthesis A crisp and insightful reflection that provides several actionable directions for future design exploration, grounded in the reported evidence. Reflection seeds the ground for future exploration, but insights are too high- or low-level to be immediately actionable. Some evidence is provided, but gaps remain. A shallow reflection that continues to report interview answers, or offers trivial or straightforward inferences that could be arrived at without interviews.

Advice

  1. Get started early. Don’t underestimate how long it can take to do the VSD analysis well. In subsequent assignments, you will begin to design and implement Fritter. So, investing time now will yield dividends later. At minimum, we anticipate that you will need to spend 30–45 minutes with each prompt to be able to conduct a sufficiently compelling design analysis.
  2. Read around, and do your research. Conducting a good VSD analysis will require more than just thinking really hard about the criteria and prompt. If you aren’t already familiar with Twitter, make sure you spend time really using it so that you deeply understand how it works (if you aren’t comfortable creating a Twitter account for yourself, consider creating a burner account using a disposable email address like iCloud’s “Hide my Email” feature, Mailinator, or the Burner Emails Chrome extension). Augment your thinking by doing some research around the prompt. For instance, are there news articles (e.g., on The Verge, TechCrunch, TechMeme, or the tech columns of the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal) that are relevant to one of the prompts?
  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 Fritter, 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 Twitter?” or “What feature would keep you more engaged on Twitter?” are unlikely to yield very interesting answers. Instead, keep your participants focused on describing their experiences using Twitter or other social networking platforms. Your goal should be to evoke rich stories and emotions, which you’ll then analyze as part of your written synthesis 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 Twitter (or another social media application) 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 tweet for more details? When do they like, retweet, or comment on something? What sorts of tweets 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.