Research, in everyday language.

Truth About Porn made years of research more accessible, but its organization and language still reflected the studies themselves. Wording varied, academic jargon was common, and visitors were left to interpret what the research meant for the questions they had.

Traffic was lower than we'd expected. Feedback, Google Analytics, and Search Console pointed to a disconnect between how we'd cataloged the research and how people were looking for it. People searching for evidence often started with a topic or question, not the title of a research paper.

The opportunity was to meet people where they were, with clear, searchable claims in everyday language. But making the research easier to understand couldn't come at the expense of credibility. Every claim needed a clear path back to the studies supporting it.

We weren't asking visitors to take our word for it. We wanted to show our work.

We changed the starting point from the study to the claim.

Truth About Porn already included searchable findings drawn from the research, but the study remained the main unit of content. Fast Facts flipped that relationship. Each entry led with a concise, plain-language claim, backed by supporting studies and related articles for more context.

That shift also created a better match for how people search. Rather than relying on someone finding a particular study, each claim could become its own entry point, using language that aligned with what people were searching for on Google.

It was more than a change in presentation. One study could support multiple claims, and one claim could draw from several studies. I built those relationships into the content structure, designed the interface and search around them, helped shape the topic categories, and collaborated on the branding.

In 2025, I built a Monday.com workspace where the editorial team could manage claims, supporting research, and related content. Changing an entry's publishing status sent its data through Zapier to a custom WordPress endpoint I developed, automatically publishing a new Fast Fact or updating an existing one.

To give the team a better starting point for new research, I developed a writing guide from studies already cited in Truth About Porn and Fast Facts. I compared how findings had been summarized with the claims we'd published, using that guidance to shape an AI-assisted drafting workflow.

New-study email alerts from PubMed and Semantic Scholar fed into Zapier, where a code step gathered additional publicly available research details from scholarly APIs. The collected information was sent to OpenAI's API to evaluate each study and, when appropriate, draft a proposed Fast Fact with supporting notes and caveats.

I also configured a custom GPT for editorial staff to submit studies outside the automated alerts. Both paths fed into the same Monday.com editorial board, with Slack notifications prompting staff review.

Research colleagues evaluated whether each claim accurately represented the study, refining wording, discussing findings, or rejecting proposals before approving anything for publication.

Simpler publishing. The shared editorial workspace and automated publishing helped a smaller research team maintain and expand Fast Facts without managing WordPress separately.

Research that worked beyond the website. Ask FTND, the educational chatbot I later built, repeatedly retrieved Fast Facts as sources for its answers, extending the content into another experience.

The most important design decision wasn't the interface or the automation. It was organizing the content around the claim. That opened new opportunities for search discovery, gave visitors a clear starting point, and gave the team a consistent structure for reviewing, publishing, and reusing research.

The challenge was making research easier to understand without sacrificing accuracy. AI could help draft a claim, but the team had the final say.