such as frequency of accessing news, platforms of news consumption, users’ interest and preference in type of news were examined in a study conducted from Reuters Institute (2014), concluding with compelling evidence about the pace of the multi- platform revolution and use of smartphones and tablets as the preferred medium for news consumption. In addition to those findings, evidently, smartphones and tablets are now the epitome of mobile computing. People use them not only for their everyday communication but also for a variety of activities including enter- tainment, work, news reading and others. The proliferation of mobile news apps, as recent numbers show (Pew Research Centre, 2015), clearly indicates the shift towards mobile news and people’s interest in consuming mobile news increases.
The aforementioned studies show people’s differences in accessing and reading the news, which evidently makes room for personalisation in news apps in terms of the ways people access and interact with news. However, to the best of the author’s knowledge, no previous studies have examined the pure navigation and reading behaviour in accessing and reading the news. For example, the frequency and time spent reading news will vary considerably between people, as will their patterns of navigating news headlines and reading articles. This means that different users would likely be better served by different interfaces, for example, a user who likes to review all the headlines before choosing an article to read would be best served by a summary presentation of all headlines and a way of marking them as a reading list of articles. Understanding people’s differences, therefore, and forming a news reader typology that distinguishes people based on their navigational and reading behaviour would inform the design of an even more personalised access not only in terms of what news content people read but also how that content is accessed and consumed.
3.2
Online Questionnaire
To investigate people’s news consumption patterns, the author designed a question- naire to collect exploratory information about their mobile news reading behaviour.
The questionnaire aimed to identify stereotypical patterns of behaviour, to probe people’s differences in reading the news on smartphones and tablets and, ultimately, through an analysis to propose a mobile news readers typology that describes peo- ple’s news consumption patterns. In addition to its primary goal, questioning peo- ple about their behaviour provides an insight into the kind of data that is needed to be collected in a mobile news app that will automatically attempt to learn this behaviour and make changes in its interface and functionality accordingly.
The online questionnaire consisted of a total of 24 questions, mainly focused on news reading behaviour with questions probing the estimated daily time spent on news reading, the frequency of accessing the news, different browsing strategies and reading style and others. Supplementary questions were also asked about news type preference such as broadsheet or tabloid, i.e., distinguishing between papers for easy reading and serious papers, to examine whether this might have an effect on the consumption patterns. Questions relating to specific features of news apps such as scrolling preferences, headlines organisation, summary of the article and others, were also asked. In addition to the primary navigation and reading related questions demographics characteristics such as age, gender and level of education were collected. Demographics have been found to impact news consumption as discussed in (Fortunati et al., 2014), and thus it is worth examining the relation- ship between potential navigational and reading factors and demographics. Overall, questions were selected in such a way as to expose as clearly as possible the users’ news reading preferences and tendencies. Table 3.1 and Table 3.2 summarise the se- lected questions by providing additional details of what each question examines as well as the category to which it belongs. There are four categories of factors nav- igational, reading, contextual, and demographics. Navigational refers to people’s characteristics while browsing for stories in the news headlines organisation inter- face, reading refers to their actual reading behaviour once they select to read a news story, contextual refers to location and the context of reading, and demographics refer to age, gender and level of education.
3.2. Online Questionnaire 47
Question
Number Questions Description Influences
Q9
How often do you read news on your mobile
device?
It refers to frequency of accessing the news
throughout a day
Navigational & Reading
Q12
How much time a day do you spend reading the news
on your mobile device?
It refers to the daily reading time spent on
news apps
Navigational & Reading Q11 Where do you often read
news?
It refers to the location of
reading the news Contextual Q14 How do you look for
stories of interest?
It refers to the strategy
used to browse for stories Navigation Q20 How do you read a story? It refers to the strategy
used to read a story Reading Q10
What time of the day do you prefer to read the
news?
It refers to the time of day Navigational & Reading
Q18
Some newsreader apps classify the stories in sections. Do you believe
this helps you to find a particular story?
It examines the usefulness of organising stories in
sections/categories
Navigational
Q19
How often do you look through all the stories of
each section?
It supplements Q14 Navigational
Q15 What makes you decide to read a story?
It examines reasons why people choose to read a
particular story
Navigational
Q17 What makes you decide to stop reading?
It examines reasons why people choose to stop reading a particular story
Reading
Q21 How much attention do you pay to a story’s images?
It examines the usefulness
of story’s images Reading Q22 How much attention do you
pay to image captions?
It examines the usefulness
of image captions Reading
Table 3.1: Selected questions related with navigational, reading and contextual factors.
sourcing platform, CrowdFlower1 , but participants were also recruited through friends and colleagues and social network posts. The online questionnaire can be retrieved online here2and a copy of it can be found in the Appendix A. The inclu-
1CrowdFlower: http://www.crowdflower.com 2Online Questionnaire URL: http://goo.gl/HvoxBc
Question
Number Questions Description Influences
Q1 What is your gender? It refers to the gender Demographics Q2 What is your age? It refers to the age Demographics Q3
What is the highest level of education you have
completed?
It refers to the level of
education Demographics
Table 3.2: Questions related with demographic information.
sion criteria required participants to be 18 years or above, use a mobile news apps to read the news at least a few times in their life, but preferably to read the news on a regular basis using a smartphone or tablet, so their digital news consumption habits could be gauged. Each successful completion was remunerated with a token of £0.40 and the study lasted for a month.
Two hundred and seventeen participants responded to the online questionnaire. Before conducting the analysis, a data cleaning was performed to drop duplicate responses and outliers due to there being no control on the online crowdsourcing platform from which we experienced some duplicate responses submitted using the same I.P. address. Further data pruning was conducted on some responses where participants responded that they do not read news on mobile devices, thus they had to be dropped from the analysis.
The final dataset comprised of one hundred and forty participants, fifty-four fe- males and eighty-six males. Participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 51 (M= 32, SD = 8, 72% participants aged between 18 and 35) and nighty-two participants (66% in- cluding Bachelor’s degree or higher) hold higher education qualification. The geo- graphical distribution of the responses came from four different countries including 34% from USA, 29% Cyprus, 25% United Kingdom and 12% Germany. Table 3.2 provides the questions relating to the demographic information. It is important to note here that the majority of respondents to the questionnaire are Millenials com- pared to other group ages, thus results should be interpreted carefully. But it is also aligned with previous works (Deal et al., 2010) that found this age group to be more receptive in technology adoption, a fact that it is important for the investigation of adaptivity in news app.