Think Tank

Getting between the covers

Paul and Rebecca both characterized themselves as “heavy online news readers.” And although it’s true that they’re heavy consumers of news, their behavior reveals that they are not getting the majority of their news from newspaper websites, as this description might suggest. While Paul is using the Internet to set up his newsletters and alerts, he’s not really reading news online. Instead, he’s reading e-mail newsletters, which is typical of about 50% of Americans who have broadband at home. Rebecca, for all her diligence, is really gathering all her news and commentary offline, then supplementing it by scanning the headlines online, typical of about 24% of all online news readers. Neither one, then, really lived up to their characterization of how they use the news.[1]

It’s no surprise that Paul and Rebecca can’t articulate what they actually do. People often say one thing, then demonstrate another. Rebecca and Paul are just two of twelve people that we’ve been spending time with for a design research project for a news and media company called Daylife. While the results will be used to inform the user experience of a website in the short-term, our larger goal is to understand how people are consuming news and information today. And the fact that people are unaware of the way they consume news is precisely the reason we wanted to conduct the study in the first place.

This approach to understanding user behavior is much different than techniques we have used in the past. Typically, we would conduct “usability testing,” bringing participants into a lab with a two-way mirror, a computer, and a camera. What are people clicking on? Does it take 120 or 150 seconds to make a purchase? How many clicks away is the desired information? These were the kinds of questions we were asking, and we were measuring users’ satisfaction based on their very rigid answers.

For all our good intentions, those labs tear people away from their familiar surroundings—away from their browsers, their bookmarks, their saved passwords, their instant messenger clients, and RSS readers. The lab environment just isn’t a useful way to gather information about aspirations and intentions. [2]

When it comes to consuming news and information, our behavior is increasingly multi-layered and messy. Context is much more critical than it was when using a computer was often a one-way interaction. “People are more complex than we were giving them credit for when we started doing usability testing. We thought features were important to them, more efficiency was important to them,” says Todd Wilkens, Design Researcher at Adaptive Path, who does a lot of in-home research for clients. “As it turns out, we need to understand people in context. We need to understand the importance of emotion, the importance of culture, the importance of meaning. These are the kinds of questions that just simply cannot be answered in a lab.”

In our own research, we tried the conventional usability-lab approach at first. People politely clicked through news sites, pointing out labels that were unclear, talking about news they may have wanted instead of what they were seeing. But the results seemed shallow and only were giving us half the answers—answers about specific interaction design problems—when what we were seeking to understand was a complex network of behaviors that is transforming the way we get information.

Figure 2: Usability testing provides useful information about interaction design elements at the page level. When trying to determine larger conceptual direction, however, lab testing was not a good approach.

Being able to see a person use their own tools, from the mundane to the complex, in their home or office reveals a whole new set of behaviors. These behaviors, raw and unrecognizable even to the people demonstrating them, are starting to reveal new requirements for getting news and entirely new definitions about what news is.

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