QUIN: A platform for verified photographs, secured by the blockchain
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OVERVIEW
Photographs play an important role in the proliferation of fake news. The challenge was to create a service that provides a secure and transparent news sharing experience. This is especially relevant today because people are exposed to an abundance of misinformation on digital media.
The QUIN system is an easy, efficient and credible photo sourcing experience for journalists, secured by the blockchain to ensure authenticity.
Role: ux designer, co-researcher
Product: Website, Mobile App
Project Length: 8 weeks
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USER RESEARCH
Secondary research + interviews with journalists across different continents.
Journalists spend a lot of time searching Twitter and Instagram for relevant news photographs to use in their news articles. They then contact the owner to use the photograph.
Opportunity area
Journalists need photographs to build credibility of their news stories within their audience. Currently, journalists encounter a lack of accessibility to verified photographs. Sourcing photographs today takes a large amount of time and effort for journalists.
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DESIGN IDEATION
Based on our research findings, we explored 3 concept posters.
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PROTOTYPING
After brainstorming as a design team with multiple rounds of iterations, we created paper prototypes to quickly test with our users to validate the user flow and ensure the content and actions line up with the user mental model.
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THE FINAL SOLUTION
QUIN is a platform for journalists to source verified photos. The QUIN database is crowd sourced by photographers, reporters and civilians who take a photo through the QUIN mobile app. The QUIN app immediately records location, date, and other metadata of the photograph, and secures it in the blockchain to ensure that it cannot be manipulated by anyone.
Key features:
Take verified photographs with the QUIN app and contribute to citizen journalism.
See the trending photographs and search using filters and hashtags.
Make a request to journalists for a verified photograph you would like taken.
Responsive website version for quick and immediate use of a photograph in an article.
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LEARNINGS AND NEXT STEPS
Over the course of this project we realized that the ecosystem that supports unverified news articles is extremely complex. Measures need to be taken on several fronts by journalists, readers, social media companies and news agencies to combat it.
Our next steps to build on the QUIN prototype is to incorporate DSLR compatibility so that journalists can access professional quality photographs. We are also exploring how we can incorporate a subscription model for news agencies to help their journalists expedite the process of buying a photograph.