Designing for trust in news media: Encouraging digital literacy through product design

Fake news, or false information in the media, is likely as old as legitimate news, but gained newfound attention in the months before and after the 2016 United States presidential election. The prominence of widespread false content in the media has converged with existing critiques of the media industry related to biased and misleading content, in an environment marked by the notable decline of trust in the industry. This represents a shift in media industry dynamics which negatively impact media consumers, who rely on information in the media to form and adapt their individual worldview. Due to advances in technology, consumption of news media is rapidly shifting to mobile device-based experiences, which are primarily the domain of digital product designers. These designers are responsible for the user experience (UX) on mobile devices. Thus, they are tasked with ensuring consumers are able to access reliable news media content and build a better understanding of this media content through improved media and digital literacy. To do so, digital product designers need resources and framing to support them to this end. Through the lens of design inquiry, this research-based thesis explores themes related to media industry dynamics, critical thinking, and the future of false information. This enables the creation of a research base and development of a preliminary set of product design guidance to support designers in building better media consumption experiences for people. A literature review is conducted to understand the media industry trends that have led to the current situation. Models and visual schemas are constructed to aid designers in comprehension of this situation. These models show how false information and digital product design affect consumers’ ability to form an accurate worldview. The projected evolution of false information and its impact are assessed. To understand different methods of addressing the trend of false information from a product design perspective, existing implementations developed by technology platforms are reviewed. The culmination of this research is future-oriented product design guidance which emphasizes presenting consumers with accessible, effective contextual information and encouraging critical thinking capabilities while consuming media content. The guidance provides practical, adaptable recommendations for designers along with the research foundations, and should serve as an effective resource for digital product designers to enhance and augment the user’s experience consuming media

The Dynamics of Transformation in the Development of Digital Services

Service providers are increasingly depending and using digital infrastructure and tools provided by digital platforms to transform their services and develop digital ones that meet the needs of heterogeneous end users. However, while there is an emerging literature of developing digital services, little is known about the dynamics of transformation. Using multiple cases of firms that develop digital services, the digital service taxonomy was synthesized to understand the dynamics of transformation in developing digital services. This study identifies five main dynamics: the services experience, the service process, the service capabilities, the service environment and the service delivery.  Each of those dynamics and their associated factors is explored under the objectives of business, interaction and technology. This enables us to extend the existing literature on digital service development in particular and contributes to the research of digital innovation in general

The Hankie Probe: A Materialistic Approach to Mobile UX Research

Mobile user experience (UX) research can benefit from unexplored opportunities from theory and practice. Contemporary sociology has developed sophisticated understandings of mobilities that can expand the scope of mobile HCI research. At the same time, we need to extend the scope of mobile experience beyond its current main foci on the portable device and moments of experience. We report the interim results of exploratory pilot studies of a fabric based probe that has been developed to extend the scope of mobile experience research both theoretically and in the range of insights that can be collected in mobile user studies. We report our initial experiences with a 'hankie' (handkerchief) probe that aims to gather rich usage and experience insights for early stages of design

Human Factors and Innovation with Mobile Devices

Advancements in technology are a significant driving force in educational innovation, but a strong focus on technology means that human aspects and implications may not be given the attention they deserve. This chapter examines usability issues surrounding the use of mobile devices in learning. A key aim is to empower educators and learners to take control of personal devices and realise their potential in relation to teaching and learning. The background section reviews the development of usability studies and explores why mobile device usability presents specific new challenges. The impact of changing requirements in education, and new visions for ways of thinking and competences that learners should be acquiring, are also examined. Finally, the chapter provides a set of concepts that can inform conversations between educators and learners, mobile system engineers, developers, support staff, and others

Mobile Usability in Educational Contexts: What have we learnt?

The successful development of mobile learning is dependent on human factors in the use of new mobile and wireless technologies. The majority of mobile learning activity continues to take place on devices that were not designed with educational applications in mind, and usability issues are often reported. The paper reflects on progress in approaches to usability and on recent developments, with particular reference to usability findings reported in studies of mobile learning. The requirements of education are considered as well as the needs of students participating in distance education; discipline-specific perspectives and accessibility issues are also addressed. Usability findings from empirical studies of mobile learning published in the literature are drawn together in the paper, along with an account of issues that emerged in two mobile learning projects based at The Open University, UK, in 2001 and 2005. The main conclusions are: that usability issues are often reported in cases where PDAs have been used; that the future is in scenario-based design which should also take into account the evolution of uses over time and the unpredictability of how devices might be used; and that usability issues should be tracked over a longer period, from initial use through to a state of relative experience with the technology

Spending time with money: from shared values to social connectivity

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is a rapidly growing momentum driving the development of mobile payment systems for co-present interactions, using near-field communication on smartphones and contactless payment systems. The design (and marketing) imperative for this is to enable faster, simpler, effortless and secure transactions, yet our evidence shows that this focus on reducing transactional friction may ignore other important features around making payments. We draw from empirical data to consider user interactions around financial exchanges made on mobile phones. Our findings examine how the practices around making payments support people in making connections, to other people, to their communities, to the places they move through, to their environment, and to what they consume. While these social and community bonds shape the kinds of interactions that become possible, they also shape how users feel about, and act on, the values that they hold with their co-users. We draw implications for future payment systems that make use of community connections, build trust, leverage transactional latency, and generate opportunities for rich social interactions

Designed and user-generated activity in the mobile age

The paper addresses the question of how to design for learning taking place on mobile and wireless devices. The authors argue that learning activity designers need to consider the characteristics of mobile learning; at the same time, it is vital to realise that learners are already creating mobile learning experiences for themselves. Profound changes in computer usage brought about by social networking and user-generated content are challenging the idea that educators are in charge of designing learning. The authors make a distinction between designed activity, carefully crafted in advance, and user-generated activity arising from learners’ own spontaneous requirements. The paper illustrates what each approach has to offer and it draws out what they have in common, the opportunities and constraints they represent. The paper concludes that user-generated mobile activity will not replace designed activity but it will influence the ways in which designed activity develops

Multiple multimodal mobile devices: Lessons learned from engineering lifelog solutions

For lifelogging, or the recording of one’s life history through digital means, to be successful, a range of separate multimodal mobile devices must be employed. These include smartphones such as the N95, the Microsoft SenseCam – a wearable passive photo capture device, or wearable biometric devices. Each collects a facet of the bigger picture, through, for example, personal digital photos, mobile messages and documents access history, but unfortunately, they operate independently and unaware of each other. This creates significant challenges for the practical application of these devices, the use and integration of their data and their operation by a user. In this chapter we discuss the software engineering challenges and their implications for individuals working on integration of data from multiple ubiquitous mobile devices drawing on our experiences working with such technology over the past several years for the development of integrated personal lifelogs. The chapter serves as an engineering guide to those considering working in the domain of lifelogging and more generally to those working with multiple multimodal devices and integration of their data

Location-based and contextual mobile learning. A STELLAR Small-Scale Study

This study starts from several inputs that the partners have collected from previous and current running research projects and a workshop organised at the STELLAR Alpine Rendevous 2010. In the study, several steps have been taken, firstly a literature review and analysis of existing systems; secondly, mobile learning experts have been involved in a concept mapping study to identify the main challenges that can be solved via mobile learning; and thirdly, an identification of educational patterns based on these examples has been done. Out of this study the partners aim to develop an educational framework for contextual learning as a unifying approach in the field. Therefore one of our central research questions is: how can we investigate, theorise, model and support contextual learning