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PROCESS

 

I - Problem Research

We observed people on social media platforms and their ways of expressing their thoughts when faced with a problem. Many forms of thought expression were presented: a heated complaint, a careless fuss, an unconsciously biased opinion or even a charged argument. But among many emotional speeches, some tainted with logical fallacies, we have noticed that there's one kind of speech that is rare these days: a constructive criticism. 

Making a casual complaint is not a crime, never, but as it goes on, people will feel powerless when their voice couldn't change anything and eventually exhausted. They might even consider to just grin and bear it, accepting the state of being that was never considered ideal, or even decent. Sometimes it's the responsible party's fault for not being able to be 'responsible' enough. And the more this unhealthy dynamic goes on, the more the problem is being neglected.  

Focal (2019)

Design Thinking, Service Design, UX/UI Design

Focal, where you're vocal, but also focused.

We express our opinions online more and more often these days and for most of the time, we don't feel the sense of resolution. Focal is a platform designed to steer people's complaints and opinions into the way that helps form conclusions, or solutions, and put them into actions. 

Be less frustrated the next time you spot a problem in your life! 

Members:

Chanikarn Areewattanawong

Fasai Thammasorn

Papasvi Chanyam

Vorawasin Onnuch

II - Project Definition

"We're making an online social platform that turns indifferent, emotionally draining complaints into a healthy and constructive criticism."

Requirements

  1. Gather target people into a community

  2. Provide informations that are accurate and enough 

  3. Changing aimless complaining into quality discussions

  4. The organisations in power can use final conclusions from our platform to make adaptation with their plans/policies

  5. People can track the development of the responsible organisations on the discussed topics  

III - Design Direction

For the mood board, the red and blue gradient is representing how two opposite perspectives can combine into one despite the difference. And we keep things modern with rounded edges to give the progressive and casual overall vibe. 

IV - The Design

First of all, the users will be seeing the register/login screen, followed with three steps of getting started: choosing your the topics of your interests, agreeing to the community's rules and terms & conditions. 

In the main screen, popular topics will be shown in the What's Hot section, while discussions on your selected topics will be in the What's Up. With each posted comment, you can engage by rating the comment whether it's providing 'good info', suggesting 'practical' solution or you 'disagree' with the proposed opinion. The algorithm will show the comments with high rating first, with 'practical' first and following with 'good info', to help the community find agreeable solutions for each problem. 

Whenever the user want to participate in sharing ideas, they can choose to support their argument by attaching or referencing sources of informations, as well as using assisting tools to analyze or communicate better such as creating polls, creating comparison or post in bullet points.

The topics that are sponsored by its responsible organization will appear in pink so that the users know this topic is more likely to be fixed since the opinions are being observed, while the ones that aren't sponsored will appear in grey. 

To keep track of the expected improvements after the sponsored session has ended, users can check directly with the updates from the official account of the organization. 

Users can also start a new topic by the same way they give a comment and a hashtag will be required. They can manage their selected interests and see their comment history in their profile page.

V - Project Timeline

VI - Reflection and Suggestion

  • The transition between What's Up / What's Hot menu in the first screen and the same menu in the next screen could be more continuous by adding a home button to link back to the first kind of menu interface.

 

  • Fact checking is an interesting aspect of any discussion. Adding this feature to each topic might be helpful to the users.

 

  • More testing needs to be done to see if the algorithm of giving less priority to the disagreed comment would really be contributing to the conversation, especially if that would not be, instead, making the discussion automatically less democratic 'from the start' and more prone to logical fallacies as well as biased decisions. 

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