Western Knight Center: The Business of Online Journalism

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Western Knight CenterThe Business of Online
Journalism April 16, 2004 Laura Ruel, Estlow
Center, University of Denver
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What do you see?
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What did we want to learn?

• What are the most effective ways to present
  editorial content on news home pages?
• What stories should be told using multimedia?
• What can we learn about how users interact with
  ads on news Web sites?
• Once users decide to enter an interior article
  page on a news website, what keeps them there?

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What well do today

• Brief understanding of the study in terms of
• Goals
• Past eyetracking research
• Procedures
• How eyetracking works
• Well track some users here and compare their
  thoughts about their experiences with their
  actual tracking behavior.
• Preliminary observations
• Your reactions
• Whats next?

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What was done before?
Eyetrack I - Eyes On The News - 1990
Eyetrack II Eyetrack 2000
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What did we do?

• Eyetools Insight Reporter

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What are our goals?

• Present these preliminary findings to the news
  industry
• Solicit reaction, opinions, and suggestions on
  what we've done so far
• Take your feedback and ideas and embark on Part 2
  of this project
• Take this opportunity to better understand what
  the news industry wants and needs

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Procedures

• Created a series of mock news websites based on
  what we determined were typical news Web page
  designs.
• Controlled 5 specific variables on each set of
  the home pages.
• Headlines with blurbs vs. headlines without
  blurbs
• Size of headline type, large vs. small
• Size of text type, large vs. small
• Amount of content (scrolling vs. non-scrolling
  page)
• Pop up ad vs. no pop up ad
• Controlled variables on article level pages
• Created article presentations in multimedia vs.
  text formats.
• Wrote a recall comprehension test
• Selected high-quality multimedia presentations to
  observe how participants interacted with the
  content.
• Invited 50 participants to spend about an hour
  with this content
• Tracked and analyzed eye movement

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Sample page
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Sample page
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Sample test pages
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Tracking data individual session

• Heres a video that shows how one participants
  eyes moved through the test Web site to the left.

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Tracking data Knight fellow

• Describe your experience
• Watch the video

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A single-user session
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A single-user session
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Sample test pages
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Heatmap data from those pages
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Heatmap explanation
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The findings

• Report of our observations will be available in
  May.
• Today Ill provide a small preview of some things
  weve noticed so far.

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Sample finding

• Blurbs with headlines caused drop in reading down
  page.

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Sample observation

• What is the typical scanning pattern for a home
  page?

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Sample observation

• Static ads are seldom seen.

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Sample observation

• The effect of photos of viewing patterns.

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Sample observations

• Visual barriers affect eye viewing patterns.
• Multimedia content does not always increase
  reader recall of story information.
• Navigation placement top, left, or right gets
  similar fixation and usage rates in all
  positions. But top navigation performs best.

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Visit us in mid/late May

• Weve got lots more findings and observations.
• http//www.poynter.org/eyetracker is the place to
  watch.
• Extensive coverage and industry analysis of
  findings at Poynter.org.
• Tell us what we should do post-pilot study!
  lruel_at_du.edu.