In a two week period with a team of 4 others I evaluated the website Reddit against Nielson’s 10 heuristics and we devised a custom criteria inspired by Humane by Design and Tarot Cards of Tech. The goal of this project was to thoroughly evaluate Reddit’s design for both usability and ethicality, present our findings, and design solutions to improve its accessibility and user-friendliness.

As in previous evaluation projects used Nielson’s Heuristics as the criteria that was evaluated on s severity scale of 0-5. But this alone would not be sufficient for an ethical design evaluation because our goal was to assess the humaneness of the design, not just usability.

Ethical evaluations help us step back and consider if what we are designing is truly keeping our users’ dignity and wellbeing in the center of our process. This prompted us to create a new scale that focuses on (A) User Wellbeing, (B) Societal Change, and (C) Inclusion/Accessibility. Each of these are rated with a severity ranking ranging from 1 - 3, 3 being the most severe meaning that this digital experience has pronounced real-world affects. This allowed us to be quick and more in detail with our assessment by rating things like a lack of screen-reader optimization a C2.

Through our evaluation we found three major themes of issues focused on theft of users’ time, inaccessible design to those who are impaired, and unmoderated opportunity to breed hate and toxic behaviour.

We reframed the problems we uncovered and used these new statements along with personas to ideate solutions that would evolve Reddit platform. The majority of ideas were in the form of new digital features to be integrated within the existing site experience.

The result of this critical evaluation was the design of 5 digital feature recommendations for the Reddit platform. These features fit under the three opportunity areas we focused on during the framing of our ideation phase. Several of our design proposals even independently became adopted by other major platforms and Reddit itself in the years following this project.

User Activity Information

The first feature summarizes user activity data on profile pages that would empower users to make more conscious use of their time on the platform by breaking down where and how they engage with Reddit’s numerous communities.

Communicating users’ types of activity aims to make Reddit users more aware of their time usage as well as their content consumption habits.This creates the opportunity for users to know more about themselves, one another and the communities they’re a part of, while maintaining the valued anonymity of Reddit.

Time Management

Reddit has a reputation for being a time waster with its design often leading users to wander aimlessly down different paths and end up still browsing at 3am. With that in mind, our second suggestion aims to make explicit the amount of time and content that a user consumes in each session, and gives tools to limit over use.

This is executed in two concepts: a timer and page limiter which both put more power in the hands of the user to choose if they want help pulling themselves away from the platform. Additionally, the stats and list views give people quick access to their usage data to give a better picture of their digital wellbeing.

Inclusive Content

The third proposal encourages, through the use of trophies, redditors to upload content with alternative text and/or subtitles. This not only appeals to people with sensory disabilities, but also anticipates the varying environments users browse from such as noisy environments that impede some normal aspects of content consumption.

Misinformation Management

Misinformation management is our proposal to clearly label the reputability of posts. When submitting content, posters can add additional links as citations that further support the information they are sharing or it can be added by moderators.

With this addition, we aim to change the culture of information consumption to naturally include fact checking by making it even easier and more intuitive to get sources on information.

Day-Maker Award

Our final proposal makes use of the existing Reddit “awards” feature but adds additional awards like the “Day-Maker” award. This lets users recognize others for outstanding, positive interactions. Unlike the “Silver”, “Gold”, and “Platinum” awards available at the time of this project, this new one is free to all users but limited to awarding it once per 30 days.

A variety of free, more unique purposeful awards provides more special recognition that will be noticed in the community. This brings attention to the positive culture that is sometimes forgotten amongst the toxic rabble that tends to stand out more.

This project was an extremely fun opportunity to practice very thorough critical design methods and focus on a growing niche of this field: ethical design. Our process involved understanding the brand’s visual language, values, and unique position to fully evaluate and discover realistic opportunities for new developments.

It was also extremely humbling and gratifying to see our awards proposal adopted by Reddit and fact-checker adopted by Twitter in real life, showing that we were able to uncover the same opportunities as professionals actually working for these large companies. I am excited to use these methodologies to uncover new opportunities for improvement in future domains that I work in.