Cognitive Bias Social Media Research Project
This was a website design project in HTML/CSS after joining Northwestern's Social Cognition and Intergroup Process (SCIP) Laboratory months after deciding to study computer science in college. I joined as a research assistant and was tasked with helping design and create a faux social media platform to study how a randomized group of people view others across gender, race, perceived social class, and personality type. The social media platform was meant to be concentrated on the personality and interests of the people using it, sort of like a dating application, but meant for making new friends. The graduate student I worked under was Elinam Ladzekpo. My work was to realize the idea through a series of programming and design iterations, and these are the iterations below:
After a 15 minute intake meeting Elinam described she needed a fake social media platform, so through photoshop I created this mock designed from the Instagram user interface.
Then I started off with logo designing and drafting:
After a couple more weeks of iteration, I understood Elinam needed a platform that was more based on interests and personality. So I built this HTML/CSS framework taking inspiration from Acenstry.com. On the right side of the mock, I allowed the researchers to further elaborate on the personalities of their test profiles. I also tried to make the user interface as natural as possible as if this was a genuine social media platform.
One of the most important aspects of this UI design was the top "Psychological Summary" results where the researcher could display what the different Big 5 personality traits are for each user profile. The Big 5 personality traits are one of the only personality evaluation methods that have merit in being a measure of personality. Neuroticism or "Negative Emotionality" was not used in this study from the Big 5 as a result of Elinam's direction.
We tested different designs for the Psychological/Personality summary. Along with testing a supporting question on whether the user thinks those results are accurate. The participants are supposed to look at all the fake user profiles in the social media application and then answer questions about what they think of the person.
Final Design
This was the final design iteration after 3 months of work. We decided on the personality summary design because it was the most minimal and clear in what it was trying to communicate. The interests/description/activities sections were designed to merge Elinam's needs with creating a realistic social media web design. For example, Elinam wanted to have large descriptions with 30+ shows/movies/music preferences for each profile, which she had already drafted. Not many social media platforms will have so many preferences listed because most platforms go for a minimalist design. However, we managed to have all those preferences held in this user interface making it look natural and not too cluttered. I also decided on having two rows of images that represent links to the user profile's favorite content to improve the aesthetics of the designs. Once the design was complete the next 3 months were focused on creating different profile images with different personality types and unique interests that would actually be used as content in the study Elinam aimed to publish. I later won an undergraduate research grant from this work to research further into the effects of survey and questionnaire design in gathering empirical evidence.
Final User Profiles To Be Used In Social Cognition Study:
