Project
The Logical Fallacies app was created as a way to advance political discourse and help people avoid baseless arguments. Recognizing technical errors in conversations can facilitate moving forward or redirecting the conversation.
Challenges
How do you determine whether existing apps and sites that display similar information are good enough to obviate the need for creating your own?
At what point should a developer be brought in for an MVP version?
How do you remain neutral when seeking feedback on designs and prototypes for a project of your own conception?
Role
I performed a competitive analysis, created multiple wireframe versions, developed an initial layout and design, and built an interactive prototype of the app’s interactions.
Process
Competitive Analysis: I began by researching competitors for the idea. While there are a fair number of sites and apps with some of this information, they are mostly not well-produced or conceived, and many are abandoned. The best-produced product is yourlogicalfallacy.is, which has good information, great illustrations, and is moving forward.
Wireframes: Creating a wireframe helped when deciding whether the About and Splash screens should be separate, and I went with combined in order to simplify navigation. I also considered ways of organizing categories, ultimately deciding on a simple category split between logical fallacies and cognitive biases to help expose people to the difference between the two.
Layout & Design: During the design process, I realized that the Splash/First Load and About screens should display different information, which required rethinking the overall navigation and redesigning parts of the app.
Learnings & Future
Competitive Analysis: Through this project, I learned the importance of conducting competitive analysis before starting any project, even if it is a side project with an altruistic goal. This research helped me determine if similar apps or websites already exist and if my idea would be useful or just a duplication of effort. In addition, creating wireframes was a helpful step for thinking through the necessary features and interactions for the app, as well as how to organize the categories and entries.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP): The MVP of the app includes the most common logical fallacies and related cognitive biases, ways to navigate between the individual entries, and navigation within each entry. The stretch goals include adding more entries, categorization, and ways to share content, such as through iOS stickers. Another interesting feature would be the ability to modify images from sites like Twitter and Instagram with related stickers. In the long term, it would be a pie in the sky goal to have the app analyze imported text to suggest possible biases using machine learning.
Overall, the Logical Fallacies app has the potential to push political discourse forward by helping people recognize and break out of baseless arguments. By creating a more easily navigated resource that works like other apps people use daily, such as through the use of iOS frameworks and standards, the app could become a valuable tool for users.
Outcome
Once I had completed building everything in Sketch, I transferred the images over to InVision to create a prototype with interactive navigation, allowing for seamless movement between screens and scrolling through an example logical fallacy. In this version, I decided to group logical fallacies and cognitive biases in a simple way by having those two main categories, and using icons of different colors to note the category.
I can now show the prototype to friends or passersby to gauge the merit of the app's purpose and design before moving on to final designs, logo, icons, and actual app development.
If you'd like to try out the InVision prototype, simply tap on this link to test it out in a new window. Alternatively, you can watch the video clip below to see the available interactions in the prototype.