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ABSTRACT
Several news websites have adopted a homepage design that emphasizes the reduction of visual clutter and the limiting of prominence cues. We examine how site design affects news engagement and what people learn from the news. Across three experiments conducted in the U.S., we provide evidence that a more contemporary, visual-based, grid-like design enhances page views and learning from the articles compared to a more classic, text-based, hierarchical design. The specific articles that people recall, however, vary across the two designs. We supplement these experiments with a qualitative follow-up to explore what site design means for journalism practice.
Acknowledgements
We thank Brett Bowlin, Steven Nevers, and Josh Rachner for their programming assistance. We also thank the following undergraduate students for their assistance: Hayley Albrecht, Draike De La Garza, Joshua Gold, Jonathan Hyak, Juhie Modi, Sally Polk, Shabab Siddiqui, Emily Smith, and Thomas Trevino. We also appreciate coding assistance from Arielle Cardona. Thanks to Johanna Dunaway for her comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, NJS, upon reasonable request.
Notes
1 We deleted responses from respondents who could not see the website (Study 1 n = 19, Study 2 n = 30), left non-responsive answers (e.g., “good”) to open-ended questions (Study 1 n = 64, Study 2 n = 112), straight-lined on the attitude questions (n = 1 in each study), or took the study more than once (Study 1 n = 12).
2 The design choices were also informed by previous research, where several of this study’s authors did a content analysis of 150 U.S. news websites (Stroud, Scacco, and Curry Citation2016). Although examining contemporary versus classic site design was not the focus of the content analysis, it was nevertheless apparent to the authors that several sites were diverging from a classic site design and using a more contemporary layout.
3 It was rare (Study 1 n = 47, Study 2 n = 5, Study 3 n = 7) that people went back to the same page more than once. The homepage was not included in the calculations.
4 Only three respondents across Studies 1 and 2 were able to name 10 articles.
5 We deleted responses from those who could not see the website (n = 23), left non-responsive answers (n = 111), straight-lined (n = 1), or took the study before (n = 1). In the main text, we describe four of the five conditions from Study 3. The fifth condition was a “modified-classic site.” On the contemporary and modified-classic sites, selected articles were superimposed over a darkened version of the homepage. Site visitors could click outside of the article to return to the homepage. We tested whether differences between the classic and contemporary sites were due to the design (results for the classic and modified-classic sites would be the same) or the technology (results for the modified-classic and contemporary sites would be the same). The engagement and learning results favored the design perspective described in the main text.
6 Across the 44 analyses (4 aggregate and 40 article-by-article) in Study 3, there were four significant interactions between article placement and page design. For each, placement affected page views for the contemporary, but not the classic, site for an individual article. This could be due to how distinctive an image was relative to the surrounding images.