A Reference Site for Political Polarization

An Organized website for those looking to further explore the intricacies of political polarization

The purpose of this project is to build a website that allows people interested in the complex and messy topic of political polarization to learn more in a simple and organized way. Throughout this project, we learned and utilized the fundamentals of content strategy, visual design, and information architecture to build a site that not only gives access to information around political polarization but does so in a way that is easy to access and navigate and portrays the particular message that we strive to convey.

This first phase of the project of building our site was coming up with a content strategy. The themes that our team wanted to pursue were fun, informative, engaging, and inclusive. Although these all seem like great themes to pursue at first, as we started designing, we quickly realized that it is very difficult to design for all of these things at the same time.

One of the things that we struggled with was wrestling with the balance between fun and informative. On one hand, we wanted to convey a fun tone because with a topic that is not overly attractive we knew that if our tone was boring or too serious people would not be engaged and encouraged to stay on and explore the site. However, on the other hand, we did not want to undermine the seriousness of the problem of political polarization. Also, we did not want the tone to be so fun that our website would come across as an unreliable source. We knew as we moved forward with our designs we were going to have to keep this balance in mind and at each stage consider how we could best maximize one side without sacrificing too much of the other.

Another tricky theme that we wanted to pursue in our content strategy is inclusivity. We made the decision that we do not want our website to be changing our users’ minds on political topics or try to push anyone more to the center, but to simply strive to inform about the topic of political polarization in general. The reason we decided to pursue an informative path as opposed to an argumentative or persuasive path is that we believed that changing people’s underlying political opinions and beliefs is a much more difficult task than to simply provide people with the critical information on the topic and let them make their own informed decisions from there.

Now that we had our content strategy decided and we knew the message that we were trying convey it was time to start deciding how we were going to implement that. This was when we started to transition from the content strategy phase into the information architecture of the site. The first thing that we did was look for what articles and content we wanted to link to on the site. We decided we wanted to look for a wide range in articles that analyzed the problem of political polarization from multiple different angles to allow people to consider the problem from all perspectives. We ended up including articles that talked about how our country got to the polarized state that it is in, how we could solve it, and what the current implications and impacts of polarization are.

Now that we had collected all of the content that we wanted on the site, we needed to figure out how we wanted to organize it.

We did multiple rounds of open card sorting so that we could see how different people would categorize the articles that we chose to include. We took all the articles and resources we wanted to highlight on our website and made a card for each one for a card sort. Our goal was to organize this information in a way that told a compelling narrative about political polarization. However, card sorting turned out to not yield as good data as we were hoping for. The first person who card sorted for us classified our cards by content type (article, animation, etc.) as opposed to the actual content. Even after we explicitly instructed people to sort by the content itself, we realized the little information we provided on each card wasn’t a faithful summary of what each resource had to offer. Still, some groups emerged, such as a group around the perception gap and another around the origins of the problem. From these groups, we figured out what remaining groups there might be and how we could our resources into those groups. After some work, the groups began to tell a story, the story of political polarization.

After multiple rounds, the categories that began to emerge with our users were: how it happened, the perception gap, the implications, solving political polarization and getting involved. We liked this classification scheme and decided to stick with it because not only did most people sort them in some classification similar to this in the card sort, but there is also a chronological flow to this scheme from the history of the problem to how to solve it and get involved.

At this stage, we had our content and we knew the classification with which we wanted to organize it. Our next step was to make a site map and think about how we wanted the overall site to be laid out. The first decision that we made on the layout of the site was what the homepage should look like. We decided to include our explorable explainer right at the start of the website so that it is the first thing that you click on when you get there. The reason that we wanted to do this was because with the way that we build our explainer it holds the most weight if you play it before you become more involved in the topic and then it encourages you to dig deeper.

Apart from the home page, there were only a couple of other pages that we needed to include on the site. The first, and probably most important, is the learn page where people can dig deeper into the resources we collected and learn much more about polarization. We presented the resources in the categories mentioned and decided to lay the categories out in a scrollable fashion on the page to encourage people to see the chronological flow that the different categories have.

The final step to the process of building our site was to take the information architecture that we built and apply an aesthetic visual design that conveyed our message architecture. To generate a variety of ideas as to how we could do that, each member of our team built a style tile. When going over our style tiles we ran into multiple more questions about how we could balance the slightly competing themes that our message is trying to portray through our color schemes, type, and style.

The first problem was how we can have a site that visually says both, “you can have fun here” and “this is a very serious problem”. We decided to continue with the use of bitmojis from our explainer because they are easy to empathize with, but also lightweight and fun. We also liked the bitmojis because we received a lot of positive feedback on them from our usability testing.

Another large visual question we needed to address was whether we were going to include red and blue color schemes or not. Some of us intentionally included these colors in out style tiles because those are the colors that inform the user that they are in the right place and that this a site that will address political topics. However, on the other hand, other members of the team purposefully did not include red and blue because one of the important themes that we wanted to have was inclusiveness, and we did not want to include colors that were just adding to the idea of polarization. The compromise that we ended up making on this issue was to use a lot of purples, a combination of red and blue, and using red and blue only together and sparingly to display political themes.

Throughout the building of this website, we implemented design fundamentals of content strategy, IA, and graphics to try to provide insights on political polarization in the most streamlined and digestible way possible. With that being said there is still a lot of work that can be done to improve the site if we had more time. There are multiple things that we would like to add, things we would want to refine, and of course, more usability testing that we could do to learn what we could do better. Overall, this site serves as a culmination of the work that we have done on this project thus far, as well as a representation of the skills that we have grown in.

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a cura di Lorenzo Boccolucci, IV^ AO. “Storie di autunno” is published by CyberScuola, giornale dell’IIS Gregorio da Catino in CyberScuola.