Truth Goggles is a group of tools to help journalists understand how specific language might carry unintended meaning or hidden context depending on who is reading their content. It is a Bad Idea Factory project created and built by Dan Schultz, and supported by The Duke University Reporters' Lab and The Knight Foundation. I designed an interface for the prototype of the first tool.

The tool flags partisan phrases in a text, giving journalists or other writers insight into how readers may perceive meaning, bias, or intent. The prototype runs on a corpus of congressional records – find out more about the project here. Social Good Ipsum was used for the UI.

At the onset of this project we knew the basic functionality of the tool: flagging language within text and providing metadata about its partisanship. How the flags and metadata were delivered to the user was the first design challenge. After brainstorming interface patterns, below, I found they organized themselves within three basic mechanisms; flagging as you write, a one-by-one review, and an on-off/toggle-able discovery. We chose to move forward with a toggle-able experience (04 & 05), adding the functionality of advancing through the flags (07), and an available side-by-side review of changes (11).