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Luiz Agner | Presenter
Evaluating interaction design in Brazilian tablet journalism
CO-AUTHORS:
RENZI, A.; VIEGAS, N.; BUARES, P.; ZANFAGNINI, V.
Contextualization
• Data show that 46% of readers, in average, access news via mobile devices and social networks, as well as online video.
• This is an increasing trend that comes with the fall of the audience of the old media. This trend is bigger among readers under 35 years old.
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
Contextualization
• Big changes threaten the news industry business.
• There are researchers who anticipate the end of print newspapers by 2043.
Goal
• To contribute to guide interface designers and journalists to create content for tablet publications.
• To help the design of better gestural interfaces.
Case study: O Globo A Mais
• A digital edition with content specially created for tablets by newspaper O Globo*, one of the 3 largest distribution** in Brazil.
* Esso Journalism Award for Best Contribution to Brazilian Press * *Average 330.000 daily copies
Theoretical concepts
• Usability: ease of learn and use, user satisfaction and productivity.
• Communicability: means the property of a system to transmit to users, in an appropriate way, intentions and principles that guided its design.
Semiotic approach
• Interface design is not only the intellectual idea of a system model, but also the communication of this model.
• Interface is a message sent from the designers to users.
• Communicability is the property of software to efficiently and effectively explain to users its interactive principles.
Affordance
• First described by Gibson, psicologist. Made popular by Donald Norman.
• Affordance means “what you can do with something” (Nielsen/Budiu)
• Perceived affordance - When people can see what they can do.
• Hidden affordance - When there is no information available.
• False affordance - When information suggests a non existent affordance. Can cause mistakes.
Research methods
• Interviews with professionals who develop news content and news design.
• User observation testing based on cooperative evaluation.
A few findings: affordances
Affordances were not properly communicated. Users had problems to perceive additional content, like videos, infographics and more text in the stories.
There was no clear differentiation between sensitive and non-sensitive areas to tap. This caused navigation mistakes.
Cover: false and hidden
• False affordance. Readers think that you can tap in the headlines to go directly to the stories inside but that’s impossible.
• Hidden affordances. You can swipe the photos header but this possibility was not clear for the readers.
False affordances
• Basic errors of communication. • When readers want to go back to the previous page,
the Back button just closed the app and sent the user to O Globo newstand.
False affordances
• In this example, users though that header was sensitive to tap but it was not.
More problems
• Visibility • Feedback • Consistency • Non-destructive operations • Discoverability • Scalability • Reliability
Norman (2010)
A few insights
• In Rio de Janeiro, news apps are still too much based on print model.
• Journalists in newsrooms are not well prepared yet to create news content for readers interaction. They don’t pay attention to consolidated knowledge and standards of HCI science.
• There is no specific responsibility for UX nor job positions for interaction designers in the newspapers’ team.
• The reader (as user) is forgotten.
A few insights
• Affordances need to be perceived by users, so we can conclude that it is a communicability issue.
• Designers are authors of a message transmitted to the users. This message is about who the users are, what their needs are, and how they can use the software.
• Human-computer interaction is a metacommunication process, because user interfaces may be considered as higher-order messages sent from designers to users.
