November 2011
8 posts
Method
A group of sample news sites will be selected to represent a range of size and profitability but who cater to the same or similar readerships. National Dailies in the UK would be a suitable group, though perhaps reluctant to hand over statistics, especially for comparative work.* Alternately, a patch covered by amateurs, national papers and magazines as well as by a spectrum of Social media...
My testable statement (needs precision)
Certain design criteria on news websites are reliable indicators of how readers interact with content. -Content, as measured through interpreted web analytics.
Example: pages with higher ratios of text to white space seeing higher B%
Example: homepages with high numbers of stories in grid format seeing relatively high ToP - esp if length of p is relatively long. Though this maybe tempered with...
My Question
What effect does the design of online news sites have on reader behaviour?
- ‘reader’ as defined by unique visitor as defined by Alexa.com, Google Analytics, server-side analytics or other web analytics platform.
A sample group of 50-100 (too many? too few?) online news publications will be chosen for analysis of two basic kinds:
Design analyses:: Tagging the homepage and story...
Relevant design attributes
For the purposes of comparing
Grid-based design
Mag/artisan-based design
Horizontal navigation
Vertical navigation
Tabbed content areas
Comments (n/y - if yes, Commented in its own tag)
SocMed buttons/links (n/y - if yes, list each in its own tab)
RGB colour (if more than 1 colour & white in use, tag Multicolour)
Ratio: text to graphics to white space area measurements
People I need to contact
Newspaper people for access to analytics -The more the merrier (and essential here). -Getting all the UK nationals to let me look at bits of their web stats would be amazing but isn’t all that likely, regardless of my being able to present that data in a way that wouldn’t divulge individual publications’ stats. For them, we rely on Alexa and try very hard to get luck with one or...
Relevant metrics
Four metrics will be looked at and weighed against analyses of page design.*/**
Bounce% - “A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages.” - Avinash Kaushik, self-described ‘author, digital marketing evangelist - Google co-founder’, suggests B% is one of the most useful...