Over the summer of 2019, I participated in a research fellowship at the Harvard University Data Privacy Lab (DPL) headed by Dr. Latanya Sweeney. I was part of the team that worked on the Political Ads Library website. The website houses over 3 million political ads scraped from Google and Facebook and showcases key details about the ads including financial information, sponsors, and viewership.
Role:
UX Researcher & Designer, Front-End Developer
Duration:
Jun 2019 - Aug 2019
(10 weeks)
Tools Used:
Adobe XD, Photoshop, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, AWS, Github
Skills:
Wireframing, User Testing, Prototyping, HTML5, CSS, Python, Javascript
We first defined the 3 primary user groups that we wanted to target the website towards — journalists, data scientists, and non-technical researchers. Following this, we defined the goals and the information needed to achieve these goals for each user group.
In order to have a mostly-developed working prototype by the end of our fellowship, we narrowed down the features we wanted to include. Additionally, we discussed and defined the organization of content as well as the layout.
Based on the agreed upon features, we created low-fidelity wireframes to define the gist of what we wanted our final prototype to look like. We also defined the general flow and content of the website in the wireframes.
My primary task within the development process was to produce a fully-functioning front-end. To achieve this, I used HTML5, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, etc. for the web pages and Python to link to the back-end functionality. I also worked on cleaning and restructuring the dataset using MongoDB and PostgreSQL.
Below are the final prototypes for the interface. The fully-working prototype has an interface that is almost identical to the one below with a few changes. The below screens include the homepage, the ad search page, the ad info page, the advertiser info page, the advertiser search page, and the candidate info page. The website is located at the URL: https://politicaladslibrary.org/. However, it may not be viewable as it is still an active project.
By the end of our 10 week fellowship, we had a very well-functioning website and we had made more progress than anticipated. Most of the major features we had talked about including were in use. However, as of now, due to the massive size of the ad dataset, the back-end is undergoing some reconstruction to make queries and searches faster. Despite this, the work we produced directly resulted in the proposal of Massachusetts House Bill H.3921. Below is a picture of the hearing for Bill H.3921, courtesy of MA State Representative David LeBoeuf's Facebook page.
I would like to thank our supervisor, Jinyan Zang, who spearheaded the creation of this website and provided valuable support and input, as well as my team member Kevin Ngo, who focused on the back-end development. I would also like to give a shoutout to our other cohort members who encouraged us along the way. Thank you for a memorable summer!
© Nandhini Gounder 2021