21 Questions about Net Neutrality

ABOUT

In today's world the communication of fact has become incredibly complex. News is often edited down to sound bites that are designed to capture attention and reaction. Net Neutrality is the principle that everyone with a connection to the internet has equal access to all the content on the internet. It is a topic that has suffered from polarized and sensationalized communication. This infographic aims to educate users on the full big picture of Net Neutrality.

RESEARCH

My research began with watching this piece by HBO Comedian, John Oliver. Shows like this do a very good job of communicating complex topics in a clear manner. I took notes through the 20 min piece and in the end, I tried to tie everything together.

Key insight: This exercise showed that the data is deeper than it is broad. Which means the user must explore the same concepts on different levels of complexity to fully understand the debate around Net Neutrality.

The data was organized into 3 levels of complexity, 1 being simplest and 3 being most complex. This meant that users would have to understand level topics before they reach level 3 topics.

STRATEGY

The first version of design used a card layout to show all the detailed information on the topic.

There are many pain points associated with the communication of this topic:

People are not interested in reading long arguments

The topic in inherently boring

People lack historical context to current policy decisions

People are eager to choose a stand

Both sides of the arguments are very sensationalized

To combat these pain points the final strategy is to create an interactive information aggregator:

Boiling the content down to 21 relatable and common questions with answers in 280 characters

or less.

Creating a timeline of policy, technology and politics events up to present day.

Ending each question with a debate section so that the viewer has a 360° view of the topic.

The final strategy was to boil all the content down to 21 common questions with each answer being less than 240 characters. Each question would be supported with a debate section that shows both sides of the argument.

TITLE AND BLURB

To introduce this data, it is important to prepare the user to about what to expect. The title and blurb are designed to give an overview of the graphic and describe the goals of the graphic.

21 Questions about Net Neutrality. and 21 tweet-sized answers.

Recently, the debate around Net Neutrality has become confusing, complicated and biased. People’s understanding of this deceptively complex topic is often half-baked and problematic leaving them with many unanswered questions. Know your stand about this topic by flipping through the questions and seeing the debate evolve.

DESIGN ITERATIONS

The first design concept was to create an increasingly complex shape. This design does not work because it did not support the quantity of content that need support.