A UX research-led tool that helps people pause, verify, and think before they share, turning the fight against misinformation into an everyday habit.
Microsoft Design Challenge 2022 · Shortlisted, Top 16
Facts is a mobile app that helps everyday readers slow down and check what they’re about to share. Instead of policing speech, it builds one simple habit: pause, verify, decide. Misinformation then loses its single biggest advantage, speed.
The goal: make fact-checking feel effortless and non-judgemental, so it fits naturally into the few seconds before someone taps “share”.
Misinformation spreads faster than the truth because sharing is frictionless and emotional. By the time a correction arrives, the false claim has already travelled, and been believed.
I combined secondary research on how misinformation travels with primary work, interviews and a survey, to understand when, why, and how people share before they verify.
The magic I call the Internet. Want food, a haircut, or a bit of knowledge, from the day’s news to rocket science? You tap a screen and it’s all there. Is that not magic?
And it’s a magic trick everyone knows. As of January 2021, there were over 5.1 billion active internet users worldwide.
Something makes life easy, makes you feel like a magician, and you get addicted. Even when you try to escape, it pulls you back with something new you can’t resist.
Every beep is a hit of dopamine that makes you seek more. People touch their phones about 2,617 times a day, heavy users up to 5,427.
The more time you spend with something, the more you believe it, until belief becomes a blind trust that can even shape your feelings.
When news goes viral, you share it to show you care and to join the trend. Yet we rarely know enough to justify most of what we believe.
The internet leads to addiction, addiction leads to belief and manipulation, all as one connected system. Drop misinformation into that system and it can look harmless, until it goes viral.
Internet, addiction, and belief feed one another as a single loop, each amplifying the next.
A single piece of misinformation looks like no big deal, right up until it starts to travel.
Once it goes viral, it influences and manipulates millions of people across the globe.
It creates friction and can harm social groups, organisations, and even whole countries.
It can be used to polarise communities and upset the democratic process itself.
It chips away at people’s internal security and the shared beliefs that hold them together.
We saw it play out through the pandemic, in misinformation about vaccines and the disease itself.
We need a solution that breaks the chain of forwarding and sharing wrong information, one that is built by the user and for the user.
A user-led way to break the chain: helping people pause, check, and think before they share, so wrong information stops with them.
With the stakeholders and their relationships mapped, I ran a user survey. The questionnaire was shaped directly by the insights and observations gathered during secondary research.
What the responses revealed about how people come across, judge, and share information online.
Reading between the numbers, a few clear patterns emerged.
Users are highly active on their phones every day.
Instagram and WhatsApp are the platforms they use most.
Most users aren’t very interested in checking facts.
When they do verify, they lean on Google searches and trusted journalists.
What holds them back: it’s time-consuming, the internet is full of misleading information, and existing biases get in the way.
Many still want to collect facts and educate others by reporting misinformation.
They think misinformation spreads fast because people find it interesting, trust the majority without checking, and because of fake advertising on social media.
To go beyond the numbers, I sat down with users one on one. First, the process I followed to plan, run, and make sense of these conversations.
Four ways I spoke with users, one on one.
Sitting down face to face for the richest, most natural conversations.
Quick voice calls for people who preferred to talk without a camera.
Meeting online, reading expressions and reactions from anywhere.
Watching users navigate live, seeing exactly where they paused or got stuck.
What happens when a user meets misinformation while scrolling, and the two paths they take from there.
The step-by-step journey a user takes when they meet information online, from the first idle scroll to the moment they decide what to do with it.
Surveys and interviews kept pointing to the same gap: people know misinformation is everywhere, but the moment they meet it, checking feels too slow and too uncertain to bother. Four insights shaped the direction.
Nearly everyone is exposed, almost no one acts. 96% come across misinformation and 82% call it a big problem, yet only 67% ever try to verify. Awareness is not the issue, effort is.
Verification loses the race against speed. A post spreads in seconds, but checking it means digging through too many scattered, low-trust sources, so people fall back on the belief they already hold.
People want to help, not just stay safe. Across personas, users didn't only want to protect themselves, they wanted to collect facts and educate others. The design has to let them act on the truth, not just spot a lie.
Trust is the real currency. With no single credible source, a verdict only lands if it feels authentic and neutral, and if getting it is low-effort and close to one-touch.
Before shaping any solution, we pinned down exactly who Facts is for: an everyday, well-meaning sharer who moves fast and trusts their feed. These three lenses, the segment, an empathy map, and a journey map, turn that person from an abstraction into someone we can design around.
Across the survey and interviews, one group stood out: young, mobile-native users, ages 21 to 30, who run into misinformation daily. They show up in two roles. Hover a card to meet each one.
Opens the feed out of boredom and gets the news from it. 96% run into misinformation, yet only 67% ever try to verify before they react or reshare.
Posts and builds an audience, so what they share travels far. One wrong post does real damage, yet fact-checking takes time and facts often lack authenticity.
Together they sit at the busiest point of the problem: consumers spread misinformation without meaning to, while creators can amplify it, or help stop it. Win their trust and accuracy catches up with sharing.
One combined view of the segment, the consumer who scrolls and the creator who amplifies, at the moment they meet a questionable post.
“I don’t have time to check every post.” “I’m not sure which source to trust.” “If everyone’s sharing it, it’s probably true.”
Wants to be right, not misled. Quietly worries that one wrong share could dent their credibility, yet assumes the majority view is the safe one.
Scrolls fast and gets the news from the feed. Reshares, and posts, before verifying. Rarely stops to check the facts.
Curious but rushed, unsure who to believe, and a little anxious about spreading something false, while still wanting to help others see the truth.
Following the user through one real moment: while scrolling, they meet an interesting post that seems to be going viral, and set out to learn whether it is actually true.
To know the facts of the post they saw without losing much time searching different sources on the internet, and without getting confused.
Curious
Scrolling his social media account, he sees a viral post. Even some of his friends are sharing the same post.
Doubtful
He doubts the information in that post and starts thinking it might be misinformation spreading all around.
Overwhelmed
He searches for facts about the post from different sources, and ends up sifting through a lot of data on the internet.
Confused
Confused by the data he has, he compares it against trusted news channels to work out the real fact.
Anxious
Having reached a conclusion, he wants to share that fact with other users so they know the truth.
Everything converged into one statement, the Why, Who, and How, that anchored the rest of the project.
For people who share and shape opinion on social media, Facts is a digital platform that makes verifying any claim, whether image, text, or video, quick and effortless before it is shared. Anyone can request a check or tap into information already verified by AI after comparing many articles, keeping the facts open for all.
The core loop of Facts: spot a doubtful post, let AI verify it against many sources, and share the truth back, all in a few taps.
The research kept saying the same thing: people are not malicious, they are just moving fast. 96% run into misinformation but only 67% ever check, because verifying feels slow and effortful. That reframed the whole brief. The job was not to block or shame anyone at the point of sharing, it was to slip a lightweight pause into a habit they already have. A one-tap popover that scans a post in place respects how little time and patience people have, and that is exactly what makes it likely to get used.
People told me plainly that they do not know which source to believe and that facts often do not feel authentic. So a verdict on its own was never going to be enough. The design had to carry its own credibility: show what the AI compared, surface the evidence behind a result, and let people see how a conclusion was reached rather than just asserting it. Designing for trust changed small decisions everywhere, from how a result is worded to how its sources are shown.
Existing fact-checks read like lectures, and the people I spoke to switched off the moment they felt judged. Keeping the voice calm, neutral and non-judgemental turned out to matter as much as speed or accuracy. When the product feels like a helpful companion rather than a scold, people are far more willing to slow down, check, and even pass the correction on. Tone is not decoration, it is what keeps the door open.
