Web finals

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Course evaluation link

It's here:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Lanier-10060-201910

Breakdown for the last three classes (including today)

OUR FINAL IS ON:

Friday, May 10, from 9am-11am

Here is what is due for the final:

1. Your completed, public website
2. A 2-5 page paper, with this premise:

You are head of design of Facebook (congrats on scoring such a high-profile job while still in college!). What would you do to improve the design of Facebook, to give a better user experience? You should think of visual elements, but also think of all the design choices that don't have as clear a visual stamp – there are a ton of design decisions that go into user experience, from prioritizing what sort of content rises to the top of a news feed, to running algorithms for recommendations. You can even think of this in terms of institutional design – would there be ways that FB could change its internal aims and incentives to generate better user experiences?

You don't have to frame this is a completely "anti-Facebook" exercise (though if you think FB is indeed badly designed for its users, you can be completely scathing about its current practices). Maybe you think they're doing a pretty good job – and there can still be room for improvement. Facebook is continuously changing its user experience, and if there was a lead designer there who said "Yeah, I think FB is perfect as is, nothing needs to change," they'd be out of a job pretty much immediately.

Here's how the remaining classes will break down:

THIS WEDNESDAY (5/1)

By Wednesday, read the three linked articles in your subject area (see the blog post below). In Wednesday's class, I'll set aside an hour for all of you in your subject area to meet as a group, put your heads together, and put together a presentation summarizing what you learned, which you will actually present the following Monday.

We will also review websites-in-process that we haven't seen in class yet. If my notes are right, we still have to look at: Makenna, Elizabeth, Brea, Clayton, Harris, Ty, Savannah and Allie

NEXT MONDAY (5/6), last day of class

Each small group will present what they learned to the class (in a presentation of somewhere between 10-15 minutes. This will be a big info-dump to share our knowledge. Hopefully all of the information will help inform your 2-5 page paper on design improvements for Facebook – which, again, is due at out final, on the 10th. We will discuss your design recommendations during the final (as well as looking at your finished websites).

Homework links

We're going to break up some readings for small group work. Here are the categories (people who weren't in the class today have been randomly assigned by me - names in red):

Russian interference in the US election, using Facebook (Allie and Allie, Makenna, Elizabeth, Clayton, Kevin):

https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/?fbclid=IwAR08V5UtoCB3fQist7sTonRRxAP_1YLmSUMuZhsuj83eb9HpGfs2fZE9qB4

https://www.wired.com/story/russian-facebook-ads-targeted-us-voters-before-2016-election/

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-issue-based-ads-pages-restrictions/

How Facebook scrubbed ISIS content, and why scrubbing white nationalist content is harder (Joao, Vilde, Gabby, Kyra, AJ, Savannah):

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/will-silicon-valley-treat-white-nationalism-as-terrorism

https://mashable.com/2018/04/23/facebook-removes-terrorist-isis-and-al-qaeda-content/

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw4pbj/facebook-white-supremacy-white-nationalism-hate-speech-policy


How Facebook deflected scrutiny and criticism (Kyle, Jamie, Alisa, Harris, Tyler):

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/can-facebook-ever-solve-its-problem

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/facebook-george-soros-pr-firm-discredit-critics-crisis

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html

Issues with algorithms (Brea, Nick, Grant, Allison, Deja, David):

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/04/racist-facial-recognition-white-coders-black-people-police

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-rolls-out-news-feed-algorithm-update-to-disincentivize-controversi/542409/

https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/the-facebook-algorithm-explained/

Homework for Monday

1. Engagement is important for Youtube executives because they need to have an audience, without an audience they would not be able to have a business. Engagement is also important because they can see which videos are most popular and make algorithms so that when users log back in they are presented with more videos like the ones they clicked on. This increases user engagement and increases the success of the website.
2. The issue with the recommendations page is that it will show videos that you might be interested in based on what you have already watched, and therefore reinforces biases if you are looking at videos about conspiracies, hate speech, or extreme political talk. A way of solving this problems is to scrap the recommendations altogether.
3. As previously mentioned, algorithms are made to show you content you want to see, and often the content we want to see only reinforces our own bias. Sometimes the content we want to see is poisonous, and by watching the same types of videos again and again we continue to poison our minds with false information or dangerous content.
4. I think borderline content would be a lot like the Brietbart content on “black crime”. Yes, black crime exists, but this title is obviously racist and perpetuates a false image of an entire race. Also, conspiracy videos are difficult. It is free speech, if someone wants to believe something stupid then that’s their right. For instance, I met someone the other week who wholeheartedly believed that Barack Obama was gay and that Michelle Obama was a transvestite, when I asked him where he got this information he told me that he got it from Youtube. Obviously this information is so ridiculous that it’s practically comical, but whoever uploaded it technically has the right to do so. The moment we decide to hinder people’s freedom of speech when it isn’t technically hurting anyone, we make things harder for ourselves in the long run. Freedom of Speech is more important than someone else’s idiocy. If someone wants to believe conspiracies then they have a right to do so. I think as a society we should begin to teach our children how to detect bias and false information, we should be implementing classes in schools that protect future generations from believing false information by teaching them how to fully check their sources.

Problem Log

Problem Log: 

Trying to figure out how to add a separate page that holds sub pages for the main pages while still remaining hidden. This will be for all the music.

I had to create a new page, hide it, then link the cover art from the music page to the hidden page.

I am trying to link text to a page, so when you enter the artists page, you click on the artists name then it will send you to its own page. 

I had to create a hyperlink that linked to the text.

My next issue was linking an Artist Union page to the download button so that we receive all the stats from an external site. 

I re-routed the download button with a separate link that connects to the external page, now all the free-downloads go through the Artist Union.

Creating a cover page for the entirety of the website.
Create a main page and hide the titles in the header from the sub page.

Problem Log - Allison Piccinini

Monday 4/15

• Got feedback on my homepage from the class and decided to take the "buttons" down as they were the same as my tabs in my nav bar so was somewhat redundant. 
• Started writing blog about my dog

Wednesday 4/17 

• Published my blog on Kaya to my site
• Changed color of every page to the same blue tone that is on my homepage to keep it consistent
• Messed around with my "social" (facebook, pinterest, instagram, twitter) links and animating them when you scroll through the website