UX Research Assistant

Markkula Center of Ethics - Present

The Project

Accurately quoting and referencing speakers is important in reporting and writing the news. With a team of students, I worked with the Markkula Center of Applied Ethics to develop a Wordpress plugin (DIANES: A DEI Audit Toolkit for News Sources) newsrooms can use to easily and automatically annotate their articles. This plugin uses text processing and machine learning sequence models to display the different quotes in the article, who said the quote, their gender, their ethnicity, and their position if they have one.

To use this plugin, newsroom authors would write their sample articles in Wordpress as they always have. With the plugin active, the author can then “Get Source Diversity” via a button on the editor page of the article that sends a request to the server to identify and retrieve the information. After all the data is retrieved, the author can view the quotes data in a table by clicking a link to the article dashboard. This dashboard can contain multiple datasets, one for each article the author annotates.

DIANES helps newsrooms and authors identify, in real-time, the actual demographics of article sources. This is important since in the news, there is a source bias leaning towards the dominant culture, leaving out the minority from sharing their perspectives and knowledge. DIANES helps newsrooms look at both who is being quoted but also who is not which will help in improving the diversity, equity, and inclusion of news reporting.

Note: Due to the proprietary nature of the project, I cannot share screenshots of my work

What I do

As a UX Research Assistant for the DIANES project, I mainly conducted quality assurance tests to ensure the constant software updates didn’t break the existing working functions of the plugin and that the new features worked as intended. To do this, I logged the results of each test for each page and function in a spreadsheet to track how the testing results compared to the previous feature release. If the current testing results performed well, I would leave it; however, if they resulted in an error of some kind (whether it’s the back end or front end) I would work with the team to debug and fix the error.

While I was the UX Research Assistant and mainly worked with the user interface of the plugin, I also had to use tools like myPhpAdmin and the command line to manage and integrate the data we were using. Because the team and I are not newsrooms or authors ourselves, we had to use existing data from newsrooms to test the plugin on articles with a high volume of text and quotes in a realistic format. The program integrated the article data and I had to use myPhpAdmin as my database manager to easily create, edit, and delete any data and databases from my testing environment. I also used the command line to access the latest versions of the tool, stored as a repository on GitHub, using git and ingested the article data into my machine to test the accuracy of the code.

Because I mainly worked with the user interface and front end, I also communicated with the clients of the plugin. I assisted in demonstrating the plugin during showcase meetings and worked with the client to troubleshoot the issues they were experiencing when downloading the plugin and data onto their machines.

Why is this important

My job as a UX Research Assistant working on DIANES with the Markkula Center of Applied Ethics introduced me to user experience (UX) in a more technical project. In the past, the projects I had worked on revolved around more of the design aspects of user experience - creating mockups for the redesign of the English Department’s website, making changes to the design prototype using user feedback from interviews - so working on a project with more technical elements like DIANES gave me insight into other aspects and tasks a UX researcher will do. For example, as a UX Research Assistant for this plugin, I had to analyze databases to ensure the ingested data was accurate and that the displayed data matched the data from our databases.

Exposing myself to a more technical UX role was important to broaden my understanding of the different jobs and projects a UX researcher can do. From my previous experiences, I learned, understood, and applied many of the UX design skills I had gained, which showed me the artistic and creative aspects of UX. This, however, is not everything in UX. Sure, the design and flow of the front end can great impact how a user interacts with the product; however, ensuring the product outputs and functionalities are as intended are also crucial to a user’s experience.