The News Spectrum Project | Explore the unexplored news venue
Co-authors: Carol Ho, Lulin Shan
Project Introduction
This study was conducted for a project of Communication Design Studio at Carnegie Mellon University in Fall 2020. As a class, our goal is to investigate ways of communication design that influence the way people consume news, and design an intervention to help people become better informed readers. We spent two weeks working independently at the start of the project, then grouped into a team and worked collaboratively to develop a design intervention within another two weeks. The project was under the instruction of Stacie Rohrbach.
What did we investigate?
We investigated several news sources to study how they present information and how it might help readers navigate the websites. As a two members team, we looked into four news sources: BBC News, NPR News, Google News, and the Los Angeles Times. We analyzed their visual structure (layout, hierarchy, etc.), visual form (color, fonts, contrast, etc.), and written and visual content (images, headlines, etc.).
After initial exploration, we dug deeper to understand the context, audience, and investors.
What is our GOAL of research?
How people navigate the news venue, and how do they perceive relevancy with the news.
Research Analysis
We first defined the content in two forms: The first one is the active content, which is pushed to the readers by the algorithm. The second one is the passive content, which the readers look it up themselves.
Our process was to examine the structure, form, and content on each news source’s homepage and news page, and identify similarities and differences among these news venues. In addition, we reviewed the mobile app of each news venue to study how the information is organized and formatted across different devices.
- Google News
Google News collects news feeds from every sources on the internet, re-organizes and put the real time, personalized information in the home page. The recommended news section on Google News is mainly based on the search history on Google Search Engine, and perhaps browsing history from the Chrome browser.
- Three column structure with the menu on the left, news feed in the middle, and other news lists on the right.
- Simple, clean UI with news listed in the middle.
- The information architecture is constructed by three colors and different sizes of typeface.
2. BBC News
Information in BBC News is organized in a clear grid structure. It gives a lot of weight to live news and videos. “Most watched” and “Most read” sections are generated by all users’ browsing data.
- Gives a lot of weight to imagery in terms of size and quality
- Uses neutral san serif fonts throughout
- Clear content hierarchy through contrast between font sizes and colors
- Mobile version has “My News” section for adding personal interested news topics
3. NPR News
NPR News puts emphasis on audio content on its website since it provides a network of radio stations in the US. It provides 21 newsletters for users to subscribe one or more, they can be sent in 3 different frequencies: weekly, monthly or periodically.
- Pairs each article with a large thumbnail
- Emphasis on audio content
- Uses san serif fonts throughout
- Uses blue and read as highlight colors
4. Los Angeles Times
- Dense and compacted layout on homepage
- Information organized in a grid-based format
- A strong hierarchy of fonts through using san serif and serif fonts
- Mobile version highlights TV and Podcast sources
Key Finding
- On most news venues, each news is only related to one news category.
- The mobile version generally requires membership access, which provides more tailor content. The website version of news venues, on the other hand, shows less customized recommendations.
- Personalized newsletters and news recommendation sections help cater to various interests and needs of the readers. But it also limits the possibility for the readers to navigate passive content.
Design Opportunity
- Personalized recommendation sections
- Integrate with existing service
- Self-awareness of the news reading habits
- Motivate the reader to read the news in different categories
- Provide holistic point of view for a certain topic
Who Are We Designing For?
People who read the news on the website, especially those with goal-oriented reading habits, always read the news in specific categories.
The importance to the news venues is that it’s a way to increase user engagement and loyalty. Whereas for the readers, the importance is that people can make better decisions by taking a holistic perspective toward things happening around the world.
Design Outcome
Meet Noodie! Noodie stands for News + foodie. Our design intervenes in the reading habits impacted by the news website’s structure and proposes a customized and engaging experience. The interaction aims to provide a new way to turn passive content into active content and foster the reading habit of a variety of passive content.
What are some potential outcomes of your approach?
- The readers become self-aware of their reading habits
The bubble chart that generated by the readers’ reading behavior data helps build self-consciousness of their reading habits.
2. The readers are acknowledged that the news in particular topics scatter in different categories
The recommended reading and the highlighted categories could help inform the readers where the topic might sit.
3. The readers engage with the news topic more
By seeing the voting result, the readers are more engaged as part of the community that cares about a certain topic on the news venue.
What could be next?
- Create the dialog by collaborating with the social media platform
The chatbot solution is easy to integrate with multiple platforms, and it’s already a built-in solution for many of the social media. By collaborating with the social media chatbot and creating dialog contents, we’re providing a new channel to approach users who seldom visit the news venues.
2. Give readers opportunities to generate questions to create deeper engagement.
Currently, the daily question is generated from the new’s title and editors’ input. We can encourage the reader’s engagement by providing a way for them to ask questions after reading the News.
