Introduction

According to a 2009 Pew Research Center report, 39 percent of the U.S. adult population has seen the frequency of their online use grow as their reliance on mobile devices has increased. (1) Consequently, the desktop Internet experience switches to “on the go” when users leave home and “the handheld becomes a complementary access point to connect with people and digital content wherever a wireless network reaches.” (2) At the same time, news organizations are expanding their online efforts to develop mobile media sites allowing users to access content in formats customized for mobile devices. By fall 2009, for example, the iPhone app store was offering more than 40 applications that aggregate world, nation, and city specific news in iPhone-optimized formats. Likewise, many newspapers and broadcast news programs around the world, from the New York Times to BBC News have launched their own iPhone-optimized sites. And as the number of touchscreen models such as the Apple iPhone, Blackberry Storm, and Palm Pre increases, content developers continue to look for ways to take advantage of this platform. Thus, “as a large portion of the online population gravitates to wireless and mobile access to supplement their home high-speed wired connections, the supply of and demand for online content increases.” (3)

With the emergence of new mobile devices, a need exists to test new design, functionality, and presentation strategies for news and advertising content for mobile media. This paper offers the results of a four-week study that presented iPhone users with a graphically enhanced multimedia news and advertising application. Developed by an interdisciplinary team of professors and students at a Midwestern university, the application was created to explore how users respond to a site that offered advertising and news story forms, including video, text, information graphics, interactive timelines, and photo/audio slideshows. Often, a single news package on one topic included several of these different story forms to offer users a multifaceted, multimedia experience.

This application was inspired by the relative lack of innovation related to the presentation of news content on most mobile media sites currently used. A preliminary content analysis of the top 25 iPhone-optimized news sites (from newspapers and broadcast networks) found that content generally appears as either video or text. Furthermore, it seems that news organizations generally use familiar formats; newspaper sites present most stories in text and sites operated by television stations often present stories as videos and/or written text. Yet, none of the sites take full advantage of the interactive potential of the touch screen device by offering layered story packages as integrated multimedia content. Thus, the following report attempts to provide a snapshot of how news organizations can better harness the power of the web through mobile media sites that use sophisticated graphical interfaces and content in rich multimedia forms to better engage users.

Trends in Mobile Media

Rabin and McCathieNevile (4) note that mobile users are likely to have more immediate and goal oriented intentions than their counterparts. Likewise, they are typically less interested in lengthy documents. Add smaller bandwidth connections, small keyboards, poor graphic representation and interactivity limited to basic tasks on most mobile phones, and you have a distinctively different usability model for cell phones than desktops. However, the proliferation of touchscreen phones has increased the interactive potential of smartphone use, causing some to predict that mobile devices will become the primary content delivery method of the future. One reason is the growth of mobile devices. By the end of 2008 there were 4.1 billion mobile phone subscribers around the world, or two-thirds of the global population. (5)

The growth of mobile devices, while slowing overall during the economic downturn of 2008-09, has accelerated for smartphones. (6) Sales of regular mobile phones with smaller screens, declined five percent during the same period. (7)

Due to this growth, a number of new opportunities have arisen for news and advertising content providers. For example, mobile marketing companies are testing technologies that allow consumers to scan barcodes on advertisements with their mobile phones to receive product information. (8) Cameras on mobile phones can also be used to access information about products and services by simply taking a photo of an advertisement, product, building, or location. The picture is sent to an image recognition database that matches the picture with information in the database, which is then sent to the user. (9)

By 2000, the number of households that were online had exceeded those subscribing to a newspaper, (10) driving some media analysts to predict that the Internet would “radically and unexpectedly” change the way daily print journalism is practiced. Yet, studies like the 2007 Project for Excellence in Journalism have found little evidence that newspaper and broadcast web sites are taking full advantage of the web’s interactive potential. Likewise, the ability to deliver web-based news, information, and advertising via mobile devices presents another set of challenges to news organizations. A mobile web usability study conducted by Jakob Nielsen (11) found that mobile users face four main usability hurdles:

Small screens mean fewer visible options at any given time, requiring users to rely on their short-term memory to build an understanding of an online information space.

It is hard to operate GUI widgets without a mouse: menus, buttons, hypertext links, and scrolling all take longer and are more error-prone, whether they are touch-activated or manipulated with a small trackball.

Getting to the next screen takes forever – often longer than it would on dial-up, even with a supposedly faster 3G service.

Because web sites are typically optimized for desktop usability, they do not follow the guidelines necessary for usable mobile access.

Nielsen also found the key to mobile user experience was mainly defined by screen size. Unsurprisingly, the larger the screen size the better the mobile experience when accessing mobile web sites. The key, it appears, for news organizations and advertisers hoping to maximize the mobile web and video experience is to design effective interactive sites for smartphones and touchscreen phones.

Consequently, three research questions arise from the literature review, one related to usability and two to multimedia content.

RQ1: How do users rate the news consumption experience and usability of a graphically enhanced mobile news and advertising site with multimedia content in the form of text, photo slideshows, video, and interactive graphics?

RQ2: Do users prefer one type of multimedia content–i.e., text, photo slideshows, video, and interactive graphics–over another?

RQ3: Does a user’s preference for a specific type of story form–i.e., text, photo slideshows, video, and interactive graphics–affect his or her decision to engage with a particular story?

Methods

This study was driven by two main research strategies: usability testing and surveys intended to gauge users’ opinions of content developed over four weeks for a news and advertising mobile media site designed specifically for the iPhone.

The Interface

Figure 1: The news interface includes a drop down menu allowing users to navigate various sections of content, including news, entertainment, weather and sports. The drop menu is retractable so users may hide it when viewing content in each section.

During the fall 2008 semester, students designed a graphically enhanced iPhone news interface and an interactive advertising application that would be used as the test object for this study. They implemented a research-informed design method that allowed them to solicit user feedback through several usability tests along the way. Usability tests with 12 to 15 participants were intended to gauge user interest in the interface, discover design flaws, and collect preferences that could improve the interface. Figures 1 and 2 show frame grabs from the news portions of the mobile media site, illustrating the basic design for news in this particular interface. Figure 3 shows the basic design for the interactive advertising application called “iVillage”.

Usability Tests

At the start of a four-week research period, subjects met with a research team member. After completing a brief written demographic survey, subjects participated in a usability test of the iPhone news and advertising site specifically for this study. The initial usability test was intended to gauge subjects’ first interactions with the web application and measure their levels of comfort with it during the early stages of research. Usability tests were video and audio recorded and observed through one-way glass by the mobile media site designers.

Figure 2 (right): A single story (in this case geothermal energy) is broken into multiple “chunks” each representing a different story form (i.e., video, graphic and text-based story).

The research plan included collecting quantitative feedback on the initial user experience using the System Usability Scale (SUS). Developed in 1986 by Digital Equipment Corporation, the SUS is a simple, 10-item scale giving a global view of subjective assessments of usability. The SUS was used to solicit a “grade” on the interface from the participants in order to understand their starting points. The average score of the 19 subjects was 87.5 out of 100, suggesting that with no training or previous exposure to the interface, most participants were very comfortable using the application. This is confirmed by user feedback recorded at the orientation session.

Weekly Surveys

Once a week for four weeks, the research team pushed news content to users’ phones through the mobile media site. iPhone user subjects were alerted when new content was posted, at which time they were expected to engage with the news programming and advertising content and then respond to online surveys about the experience. In weeks one and two, 17 of 19 subjects completed surveys, in week three, 13 of 19 subjects completed surveys, and in week four, 14 of 19 respondents completed surveys. At the end of the four weeks, subjects were also asked to complete an online survey about the overall experience to gauge their level of comfort with and acceptance of the mobile media site and its content as a viable news and advertising distribution program. The final survey had 13 responses. Researchers were disappointed at the fall off of participants, however, it is important to note that where usability is concerned, trends begin to emerge in sample sizes of 10. (12) Thus, the final participation numbers still warrant solid findings for a usability model.

Figure 3: In the interactive ad portion of the site, users can “walk” down a campus street by using the iPhone’s finger swipe functionality, “enter” a business by clicking on a building, and view food and drink specials by clicking on a menu icon. Users can also automatically call a Taxi by clicking on the car.

Focus Groups

Subjects were also asked to attend a one-hour focus group to engage in an open discussion after completing the four-week study. Those sessions were audio and video recorded and observed through one-way glass by the mobile media site designers. The number of participants in the focus group was 8 of 19 participants. Their feedback was considered anecdotally valuable.

Results

University faculty, staff, and student subjects were recruited through the school’s mass email system. All subjects were iPhone owners and users prior to the start of the study. Participants ranged in age from 19 to 34; 17 were male and two were female. Subjects were primarily students. Although this is a small sample size, it is important to note that most usability experts maintain that with as few as five users, researchers can begin to find about 85 percent of the problems that will negatively impact one-third or more of users. (13) Thus, researchers uncovered a number of specific points related to the interface that are significant and could be applicable to this and other endeavors in related research and development.

RQ1 asked how users rate the news consumption experience and usability of a graphically enhanced mobile news and advertising site. According to the final survey results (n=14) the average rating for users’ overall reaction to the application was 3.5 out of 5.0. This rating comes from an individual item that seeks an overall reaction without breaking down the experience or the application into individual components. All of the respondents rated the news and advertising experience as either average or above average, though none rated it as excellent.

As part of the final survey, a version of the Questionnaire for User Satisfaction (QUIS) survey tool was also included. (14) This tool provides a quantitative result from a qualitative experience. Eighty-seven percent (12) respondents indicated they would like this application available all the time. Some individuals also indicated a preference for this kind of news and information application over a physical newspaper. The combined average rating for the 32 individual items in the QUIS that cover such areas as layout, ease of learning, application capabilities and quality of video was 4.0 out of 5.0. The survey data also suggests that participants found the interface easy to use. During the initial orientation to the interface none of the participants found the interface difficult to learn. Interestingly, once the four-week content push started, the participants did not provide much feedback about the design of the interface. The vast majority of user concerns centered on the relevance or quantity and quality of content; for example, at one point in the study, the video quality was improved and participants noted the improvement. This suggests that once users accepted the design and were using the application, the content captured their attention.

RQ2 asked whether users prefer one type of multimedia content–i.e., text, photo slideshows, video, and interactive graphics–over another. The data indicates the likelihood that users would choose to use the news and information application on a daily basis was also related to the relevance of the content as much as the interface itself. This relevance, as may be expected, was topic dependant. For example, one user watched every video and interacted with every content type in the sports area because the topic was of interest. Another user watched no sports videos.

One issue that affected the study was the difficulty involved in viewing video on the AT&T EDGE network, which is commonly called a 2.75G network. The original Apple iPhone used the EDGE network. The second-generation iPhone 3G was capable of using high-speed 3G networks, but this research study was conducted prior to the introduction of AT&T’s 3G offering in the study’s geographic region and, as such, the connection was slow and users generally gave up trying to view video. As a result users accessed video via the university’s Wi-Fi network or their home networks. Even given the ability to quickly start the streaming process on a Wi-Fi network, many participants expressed the preference for viewing video under two minutes in length. Some of this had to do with when and how they use their iPhones. For example, several focus group members indicated they might view video during the few minutes they have waiting for a bus or while walking across campus. Waiting for the video to download and taking a full three to four minutes to watch a video did not fit into their usage habits. They indicated a preference for scanning a text story first to see if they wanted to dig deeper into other content types on the topic. They also indicated they did not want to watch and would not watch videos with pre-roll commercials.

In addition to the news and information application, the student team also developed an advertising platform called iVillage. It was an interactive graphic representing an area near campus with restaurants, bars and shops that students and faculty patronize. The iVillage application provided users a way to check menu items and see weekly specials and upcoming events at local eateries. It also included the ability to directly call the restaurant for reservations or ordering, and to call a cab. The iVillage application rated highly with a majority of users. Most users indicated they would use such an application if it were available.

RQ3 asked whether a user’s preference for a specific type of story form (e.g., text, photo slideshows, video, and interactive graphics) affect the decision to engage with a particular story. Based on feedback given during the final focus group, it appears users interacted with all content types (e.g., text, interactive graphics, photo slide shows, and video) only because they were in a study and felt they should. This makes data about time spent on a particular content type difficult to analyze. There were no obvious trends in the data supporting one content type over another due to this non-natural use pattern.

Overall, the researchers believe this study indicates that a graphically enhanced news, information and advertising application has value in the marketplace. Particularly in the age group studied, whose members live in a world populated by multimedia, their expectation of a news source that is more than just text and even more than just video is clear. It is understandable that for subject matter which holds interest to the user, all types of content - video, text, information graphics, interactive timelines and photo/audio slideshows - add a desired depth of understanding about that topic which users appreciate.

Discussion and Future Research

This paper’s authors acknowledge the relatively small scope of this study. Admittedly, the findings reflect a very small research sample, focused on one particular touchscreen device, and one discreet interface for multimedia news and advertising content. However, the data collected for this project does help lay the foundation for broader research that helps us begin to understand the types of interfaces and content that will be enticing to mobile audiences. Thus, although the researchers cannot make definitive judgments about what will work for all news and advertising interfaces, a few conclusions that will inform future projects can be drawn.

First, graphically enhanced news and advertising interfaces for touchscreen devices show promise as a content delivery tool. Based on feedback from subjects in this study and others mentioned earlier in this paper, it is safe to say that just as design enhancements in other types of publications, such as newspapers, magazines and web sites, attract and engage users, so do ones for a mobile device. Although smaller than most platforms that make use of design enhancements, the iPhone, Palm Pre, Blackberry Storm and other smart phones offer designers a suitable palette for graphically enhanced information architecture. Not only does this have implications for how news and advertising content is presented on mobile devices, but it also presents graphic design professionals with a new opportunity for showcasing their work.

Because of the age group, results of this study may reflect generational trends away from traditional print news to digital versions. Several of the subjects commented that they would favor having access to a graphically enhanced mobile news and information application over traditional news. However, the results of this study also support the notion that their viewing and reading habits on mobile devices differ dramatically from how they would interact with traditional counterparts. Subjects noted that they were most likely to engage with the mobile site between classes, waiting for the bus, or while standing in line. This “information snacking” suggests the need for content creators to reconsider story formats and story lengths. Videos, text, and slideshows must be shorter in length and information graphics smaller and more condensed.

Subjects’ general interest in the story forms this study employed (e.g., video, text, information graphics, interactive timelines and photo/audio slideshows) is encouraging and helps address the idea that story presentation must be customized for mobile sites. Multimedia packages allow content creators to present complete stories; however, the definition of a “story” is different in the multimedia mobile context. Where most traditional media would present a complete story in a single format, multimedia packages allow journalists the opportunity to break stories into multiple pieces. This layered storytelling approach meets the “information snacking” routines of users by offering them bite-sized segments, while also offering a multifaceted package that tells a complete story.

The multiple story forms used by journalists can be effective for advertisers. The traditional 30-second TV commercial has been proven to be ineffective on mobile devices. Recent experiments testing acceptable viewing times for mobile commercials or videos found that 10 seconds is the optimum viewing length. Adding interactive elements to mobile ads increases user acceptance and usability, as found in this study with the iVillage application.

Acknowledgements: The authors thank the following individuals and organizations for contributions: Students in the 2008-2009 iMedia course–Cameron Andry, Stephanie Bane, Kyle Bentle, Katherine Bostdorff, Logan Braman, Natasha Caldwell, Stephanie Cope, Marty Filogamo, Dustin Frey, Jeffrey Kew, Bryan McWhirt, Carl Miller, Shelby Murphy, Siraj Pathan, Jeff Renoe, Amitesh Ramname, Elliot San, Kenneth Sothman, Bala Veera Ravichandra Tadavarti, Cody Thompson and Corey Walsh; ICS 660 students who assisted with usability studies–Jess Coffin, Thomas Besluau, Lindsay Smith, and Scott Wood; The Center for Media Design, Jacqueline Martinsen, Bill Vaughan, Mike Bloxham, and David Ferguson for continued support; CCIM Dean Roger Lavery; Provost Terry King; and graduate assistant Mary Phillips-Omotosho. This research was supported in part by a Digital Exchange grant from the Lilly Endowment, administered by the Ball State University Center for Media Design.

Footnotes:

1. John B. Horrigan, “A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users,” Pew Research Center Report (2007), http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2007/A-Typology-of-Information-and-Communication-Technology-Users.aspx. (September 10, 2009).
2. John B. Horrigan, “Internet Typology: The Mobile Difference,” Pew Research Center Report (2009), http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1162/internet-typology-users-mobile-communication-devices. (September 10, 2009).
3. Ibid.
4. World Wide Web Consortium. “Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0.Basic Guidelines.” World Wide Web Consortium. http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/ (accessed May 1, 2009).
5. International Telecommunication Union, ICT Statistics Database. http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/icteye/Indicators/Indicators.aspx#. (accessed May 1, 2009).
6. NPD Group, “Feature Phones Comprise Overwhelming Majority of Mobile Phone Sales in Q2 2009,” NPD Group, http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_090819.html. (accessed May 1, 2009).
7. NPD Group, “Feature Phones Comprise Overwhelming Majority of Mobile Phone Sales in Q2 2009,” NPD Group, http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_090819.html. (accessed May 1, 2009).
8. Anne Cassidy, “Interactive Outdoor Advertising,” Campaign (2008): 14.
9. SnapTell, “Technology Overview,” SnapTell Co., http://www.snaptell.com/technology/index.htm. (accessed August 29, 2009).
10. Bruce Garrison, “Online Newspapers,” in Online News and the Public, eds. Michael B. Selwen, Bruce Garrison and Paul D. Driscoll (New Jersey: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, 2005).
11. Jakob Nielsen, comment on “Mobile Usability,” Nielsen Alert Box Blog, comment posted July 20, 2009, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html (accessed August 29, 2009).
12. Jakob Nielsen & Thomas K. Landauer, “A Mathematical Model of the Finding of Usability Problems” (proceedings of INTERACT ’93 Conference, April 23-29, 1993).
13. Ibid.
14. University of Maryland at College Park, “QUIS ™ (Questionnaire for User Interface Satisfaction),” Kent L. Norman & Ben Shneiderman, http://lap.umd.edu/quis/. (accessed April 1, 2009).

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