Online news consumption survey - Part 3 (What the people want)
Thursday, December 13th, 2007This is part 3 of our online news consumption survey. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.
What they want
| Factor |
All respondents |
Heavy news consumers |
| Intuitive and usable |
91% |
100% |
| Filtering |
85% |
92% |
| Broad coverage of publications |
82% |
92% |
| Relevant top stories |
82% |
83% |
| Up to the minute coverage |
79% |
75% |
| Sharp summaries |
79% |
67% |
| Intelligent clustering |
78% |
75% |
Interestingly what respondents don’t want is ‘articles with a similar outlook on the world as myself’ (11% scored 4 or 5). In the comments respondents specifically asked for articles giving opposing views on the topic.
Thoughts: Basically, what everyone’s ideal is an easy to use site that selects relevant high quality articles from a broad range of publications in a timely fashion. This was a very positive result for us as this was exactly what we had set out to achieve! Also interesting is the needs of lighter news consumers is similar to heavy news consumers, which means that if we can develop a great product for heavy news consumers we will have a great product for lighter users as well. Comprehensive coverage of blogs was low down the list (44% scoring 4 or 5), suggesting again that this is a low priority.
When asked what one thing the site should do the response was:
| One thing |
Responses |
| Track interests and personalise |
8 |
| New and relevant news |
4 |
| Ability to track back to previous news stories |
2 |
| Multiple opinions |
2 |
| Sharp summaries |
2 |
| Mobile device friendly |
2 |
| Info on stance/bias of source publication |
1 |
| Identify genuine developments |
1 |
| Ability to choose sources |
1 |
| Most popular news |
1 |
Thoughts: The personalisation that most people wanted was a behind the scenes tracking of interests (much like the way Amazon recommends products) rather than them having to manually personalise. Many of the elements wanted raise deep questions about how news should be organised and presented. It will be fun working with everyone as we develop the product to see if we are hitting those wants.
Current news sources
The top news sources were:
- BBC (25 mentions)
- New York Times (9 mentions)
- Guardian (8 mentions)
- Google News (7 mentions)
The BBC and the Guardian both received significant praise for the design and usability of the site. Even though in general the respondents were very internet literate and higher than average online news consumers, use of news aggregators was low with only Google News getting a significant number of mentions. We will need to dig further to understand the underlying reasons for that.
Nigel
Popularity: 8% [?]
