Kia Boyz: Crime and Spectacle on TikTok

Semester 1 2024 - Web Design - Graphic Design
Data Visualisation

Overview

I began the third year of my degree with a course on interactive data visualisation websites, with a simple brief to tell a story about social media with data. I chose to look at the ‘Kia Challenge’, a notorious 2022 TikTok phenomena that supposedly inspired teenage boys to commit auto theft, and present it in the form of a longform journalistic article with a design inspired by periodicals like Harpers and The New Yorker.

Long story short: As a cost-saving measure, Kia chose to remove immobilisers from all of their budget car models sold in the United States, creating a security flaw where they could be started by simply ripping off the keyhole and then turning the key mechanism underneath. The discovery of this flaw caused an enormous wave of auto theft across the United States. When some teen car thieves began to post content bragging of their exploits online, the media created a narrative that the thefts were being caused by a ‘challenge’ meme, but the full story turned out to be much more complicated.

The site can be read in full here.

_{My final submission.}

Data Visualisations,
Draft and Final.

Ideation

My ideation process began with extensive secondary research into press coverage and official sources of data concerning the thefts. I also conducted searches of TikTok and informal surveys of my friends to try to grasp how it was understood by the public.

The more I looked, the more coverage and data I found reputed the popular narrative advanced in the press. Thefts of Kia vehicles had increased dramatically, and many of the thieves were young teenagers, but official FBI data showed no real increase in arrests, and google trend data showed no real interest in the content from the public. Instead of a meme encouraging young men to become car thieves, it appeared that the 'Kia Boyz' were just young men who were already stealing cars, posting social media content like any other niche group.

To capture these twists in the story in a way that would be engaging to the reader, I focused on the visual design before writing any final text. Going off some rough sketches and design inspiration from the New Yorker, I made a rough wireframe layout in Figma and Adobe Illustrator, with six data visualisations made with google sheets. My data was found from publicly-available sources, but presenting it required considerable processing and labelling on my part to have it show correctly in visualisations. The Choropleth map, for example, required me to combine two news reports of theft data, then group it by state.

First Prototype

As the middle of the semester approached, I was required to present my work to my supervisor in a five-minute presentation. I chose to focus my pitch on my key data visualisations and the overall design of the page, and we also discussed the tone that the piece should take.

I felt that it was important to push back against the sensationalist coverage that the 'Kia Challenge' had received, and not make the 'Kia Boyz' seem more intimidating or more popular than they actually are, so it was crucial for me to approach it with the correct level of seriousness. Including their TikToks would add vital context and make the page much more engaging to the user, but could easily appear to be crass and exploitative.

Ultimately, we decided it would be good to show some, but only where it serves the design of the page. My original idea for the main Choropleth map was to have it show Kia Boyz TikToks for every state and major city but we decided that this could be inappropriate, and too much of a distraction from the content of the article, so it was cut. The final site shows two embedded, muted and autoplaying 'Kia Boyz' TikToks as illustrations for paragraphs of text.

_{My initial mid-fidelity wireframe that I presented to my supervisor. By this point I was certain of the narrative, so my main focus was on finding an ideal ratio of charts to text that could keep the story engaging all the way through.}

_{The final submission rubric.}

Final Prototype

With almost entirely positive feedback from my supervisor, I felt very confident going into my final prototype.

First, I expanded my initial notes out to a 2600 word draft where I told the complete story in a rigorous journalistic style, which I then combined with my initial diagrams to create a written 'prototype' that I was able to test on four participants. My participants were asked to review the text, answer a few brief interview questions concerning the content, then provide feedback overall. I also told them to identify any areas where cuts could be made to make the text more engaging.

My layout for the website was constructed using HTML, JS and CSS, combining a simple one-column design with more complicated layouts as the page progresses, such as the section where text is intermingled with embedded MP4 video. The greatest challenge was to incorporate the Plotly charts, in particular the two tracking theft numbers, as I had to find ways to visualise changes in over 60 cities while still keeping them legible. For the first line chart that shows all of the cities, I chose a gradient colour scheme where the top three cities show as a bright lime green, conveying to the user how thefts were overwhelmingly concentrated in only a few cities. I carried this scheme over to the Choropleth map chart, having areas where the most thefts occurred take on the same lime green glow.

Once I had the page mostly ready, I did a final round of testing with a different group of four. My participants were instructed to complete brief think-aloud tests, describing their thoughts as they read through the site, then complete a brief semi-structured interview concerning each chart in detail. The feedback was also overwhelmingly positive, but my participants raised a few concerns about the legibility and interactivity of the charts - some, like the google trend charts, were hard to read and required clearer colours and more labels, while others had strange behaviours resulting from hardcoded features in the Plotly.JS suite that needed to be removed.

I submitted about two hours before the due date. My final site received very positive feedback and a high distinction grade of 90%.