The large broadcast news company that I was working at had a department dedicated to ensuring the veracity of social media content. Different journalists with them, use this content and trust that it was valid.

There was an internal app that had been used for this purpose. It had two parts: a chrome extension that scraped the social media from the site and a web application that allowed users to browse the media and update the meta data. This was especially important because, verifying media can be an ongoing process and the status of different images and videos would often change.

There were two main personas that were taken into account.

The verification team wanted all social media content to end up in the system with the right metadata.

The journalists wanted to add social media content as fast as they could and trust that content they found on the application was tagged correctly.Problem

The app was outdated and not serving the users. The chrome extension was slow and didn't always work. The application itself had a confusing UI that only the most dedicated users could figure out. Usage had dropped off sharply.

First we needed a round of research with users from both personas and to look at the usage of the current app.

One challenge with this approach was that because there was an old version of the app, users had a lot of ideas about what should be improved and changed. I managed to find the sense in the noise of the data by thoroughly mapping the full user flow and identifying what were true blockers.

One of the key findings was that, as we often see in user research, many people were able to say, "This doesn't work," and even describe how and why it was wrong. However few could come up with what else they needed as functionalities because they only knew their narrow perspective. By making sure that I had the full picture of the user journey, I was able to guide the product vision towards what right looked like even when the user could not articulate it. also conducted extensive usability tests from design to implementation and continually re-prioritized and revised features as we received feedback.

Two major design features came out of our research:

A need for the Chrome extension to work quickly and easily enough for a journalist rushing to get a story on air. We accomplished this in the design with a simple flow with minimal required fields.

A demand for the home page of the app to show all of the key information. We worked extensively with our users to determine what counted as essential and defined the information hierarchy. This led to a design that featured the photos and stills of the video in column three that were highlighted in colors that corresponded to their verification status. The simplicity of red means don't use and green means can use made the system highly attractive to our users.

We conducted extensive usability testing to validate and refine the design. The design process was highly collaborative with our users, which led to an easier rollout.

A streamlined, browsable site that prioritized the media previews and the high priority usage information. The Visual Verification team reported that their own work was significantly easier and that there was a 25% increase in usage from other departments.

This was a major workflow improvement for this team. It ultimately ensured that the news could be covered with more accuracy and speed, which helped the newsroom stay leading in major stories and protected it from major gaffes that could be caused by misreporting.